Content Warnings

Cannibalism
Body horror
Memory loss
Depersonalisation
Body shame
Dysphoria

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Iriko was hungry.

Iriko was always hungry these days, no matter how much she ate; she could recall a time before the incessant hunger, but the memories had grown dim — a prior era of her life, back when she had possessed arms and legs and a chordate spine. She used to have a stomach, which she could fill by pushing meat and gristle down her throat with a tongue. In quiet moments she fondly recalled the sensation of curling up to sleep with a full belly, to doze and digest alongside companions and friends, in a big pile of slumbering limbs and warm bodies snuggled beneath ragged coats.

None of those things happened anymore. Iriko slept in isolation, in the loneliest places she could find, with her senses wide open.

These days her whole body was a stomach, too large to fill.

Finding good things to eat was also a challenge. Iriko could spend entire days slurping up the black and grey mould which grew all over the city, but grazing on nano-mould always left her feeling slow and dull, like there was less of her than before, even though her physical mass would increase by however much she had ingested. She could easily digest concrete and steel and brick — just melt it with a bit of acid first — but that inevitably made the hunger worse. She could not extract any benefit from inanimate matter, not unless the metal and polymers came from the nano-rich bionics of a living zombie.

Hunting was frustrating. Iriko dared not creep too far inside the graveworm’s kill-zone, where the most vulnerable meat could be found; worm-guard might struggle to destroy her entire body, but they could still diminish her, split her into pieces, scatter her mind. Kinetic force was not much concern, but worm-guard had worse weapons than bullets: phosphor-fire, neuro-chemical disruptors, specially manufactured surface-active agents — all things designed specifically to deal with creatures like her. Iriko was vaguely aware that she’d run afoul of the worm-guard before, but the memories were fuzzy and disjointed. She knew that once she had been much larger and more confident. She had not been ‘Iriko’, but something else, something more coherent and fearsome, something with full memories and a name that was more than the weight of shame. That other, prior, better thing — not Iriko — had penetrated the worm’s safety and eaten many hundreds of revenants. But then she had been burned and cooked and torn into tiny parts, by worm-guard with skins she could not dissolve and weapons she could not deflect. The tiny parts had fled. No others had survived the mistake.

Iriko was one such tiny part.

Iriko was equally terrified of venturing away from the edge of the graveworm’s kill-zone; out there in the true wilds lived things which could eat her as easily as she could eat an unprotected revenant. The most dangerous things in the deeper wilds did not risk coming close enough to catch the worm’s attention, which meant Iriko was safer when she stuck close to a worm — but not too close. On the rare occasions that the true monsters came her way, Iriko grew herself a shell, turned off all her senses, and pretended to be concrete.

Iriko knew that she had made a mistake, or a chain of mistakes, reaching back to before she could remember. She had made decisions about what to become, about how to use the meat and gristle she had pushed down that long-forgotten throat. She had been both cowardly and cruel; now she was trapped between wilds and worm, a girl who was only viable in this narrow margin.

And barely a girl anymore. She didn’t like to think about that. Crying was a waste of resources.

Revenants rarely wandered beyond the edge of the graveworm kill-zone. The ones who did tended to be clever and strong, or well on their way to leaving the zone themselves. If Iriko wanted to eat then she had to be clever and strong as well.

And that’s why she was hunting the tank.

The tank was far from the most interesting thing to happen lately. First a meteor had fallen from the skies and then revenants had swarmed all over the impact site; Iriko had smouldered with frustration that the meteor had fallen just inside the indistinct boundary of the graveworm’s kill-zone, placing all that revenant meat tantalisingly beyond her reach. But some of those revenants had been brave enough or stupid enough to edge just beyond the safety of their worm-guard shepherds. Iriko had herself several successful hunts and some very tasty meals; she was still digesting a particularly large one when the tank turned up.

The tank had come roaring out of the wilds, right past Iriko, and then plunged into the graveworm’s kill-zone, into the middle of what sounded like a huge fight. Iriko had been hanging around in the hopes that some stragglers might retreat in the wrong direction and right into her. But then the tank had returned, intact, which was incredible because it must have fought the worm-guard; then, even more incredibly, a revenant had turned up and knocked on its rear.

That revenant had spooked Iriko very badly; she had looked up at exactly where Iriko was hiding, and then winked, as if she could see right through the concrete and Iriko’s refraction shielding. Iriko hated that, she hated being seen, she hated the knowledge that anything or anyone could witness her as she was now, naked and ugly and shapeless. She had almost pounced from her hiding place to tear the revenant apart — but she was too ashamed for that.

The tank had surprised her again by rumbling off back toward the graveworm kill-zone a second time, with the revenant tucked inside its belly. Round two with the worm-guard? How was that even possible?

Iriko had not expected to see the tank again. Surely it would be destroyed.

But the tank had returned to the edge of the wilds a little while later. It wedged itself in a choice bit of cover, shielded by the collapsed body of an old factory, with a nice clear view down a long empty street. Then the tank had stopped moving for a very long time, all the way through the night and the rainstorm and the morning drizzle.

The tank called itself ‘Pheiri’.

Iriko learned that when she squirted a stream of microwaves, IR comms, and ultrasound echolocation at it. She expected no returns except the topography; the tank was such an interesting shape, with lots of little pits and holes and bumps and knots and curls. She might turn that shape over in her mind for months.

But the tank answered; name! rank! serial number! The tank listed a vast variety of weapons at her and blared warnings in the language of missile locks and ammo-count demonstrations and the chemical composition of warhead payloads; it swivelled the muzzles of auto-cannons to point at the spot from which she had broadcast, and covered her with the firing arcs of half a dozen high explosive missile pods and incendiary projectors. The tank made itself very clear, in no uncertain terms, with no room for misinterpretation.

Iriko tried to ride back up the comms ping with a clutch of viruses, but the tank brandished countermeasures of its own; Iriko had to purge a section of her short-term memory to stop them from spreading through the rest of her flesh.

Then the tank cut the line and stared at her with sensors and weapons, urging her to go away.

But Iriko did not want to go away, not after that. Now she was very interested.

The tank — Pheiri — called itself a ‘him’. That piqued Iriko’s interest further. She’d not met a him in a very long time. Perhaps there were some out in the wilds, zombies or otherwise, but she couldn’t remember ever talking with one.

But her real interest was Pheiri’s hidden meat.

He was carrying zombies in his belly — little throbbing morsels of fresh, rich nanomachines, undigested and moving around. She’d seen that winking zombie get aboard him earlier, and much later she witnessed one of them climb out onto his top deck for a few minutes, a smaller one with high-grade bionic limbs, glowing to her nanomachine-sensitive readouts like a juicy slab of roasted meat.

Other revenants had come to bother Pheiri a few times during the night, but he didn’t capture those ones and tuck them away inside his belly-pouch: he shot at them with some of his smaller weapons. Most of them ran away to regroup, but some of them died. Pheiri did not move up the street to consume the corpses, but just left the kills uncontested.

The corpses were still there when dawn came, all split apart and wet and red. Iriko wanted to eat them, but in order to reach the dead revenants she would have to expose herself to the open street, with Pheiri at one end. He would see her, her real body, even through her refractive shielding. He would see her in the visible light spectrum.

She wasn’t worried that Pheiri might shoot at her; that was just silly talk, boys liked to do that.

No — she was ashamed of what she’d become. She did not want to show herself.

Iriko slid and slipped and slithered down to ground level anyway, just beyond Pheiri’s sight. First she tried to make herself look like concrete and creep out into the street, but Pheiri turned all his sensors toward her anyway. He saw right through the disguise. She retreated and tried something else: she extended a small part of herself and tried to make it look like a revenant, with arms and legs and a head, with curves in the right places, and long black hair, just like she used to have. She dressed it in a pink kimono and put sandals on its feet. She turned it around several times and thought it was very pretty.

But when she stuck it out into the street and walked it over toward the corpses, she started to feel horrible and fake and wrong. The puppet didn’t even look like she had done in life — she couldn’t remember clearly enough. The kimono was all fleshy and rippling, the hair looked like black straw, and she couldn’t make hands anymore and the lips didn’t work and there were no teeth and—

Iriko dissolved the puppet into a pseudopod and pulled it back into her main body, ashamed that she’d shown something so pathetic to Pheiri. She attempted a couple more tricks, but after the stunt with the puppet she just wanted to grow eyeballs and cry to herself in the dark.

Eventually she crawled out into the street. She didn’t even bother with her refractive armour. She slumped up to the corpses and covered them with her body, dissolving meat and organs and bionics and bones. She made no effort to hide from Pheiri. She stared at him, daring him to say something rude.

Iriko was huge and formless, maybe two thirds Pheiri’s size. Her ‘skin’ was the colour of oil on water. Faceless and limbless and semi-transparent. She knew what she was.

Pheiri stared. Pheiri said nothing. Pheiri let her eat, and did not judge.

When she slid back into the ruined buildings, Iriko started to think that maybe Pheiri was a nice boy.

But the scraps of meat were not enough; no amount of revenant meat ever was. Iriko circled the area a few times, worming her way through the tops of the tightly packed buildings, squirming down stairwells, pushing her protoplasmic body through air vents and duct systems. Eventually she located more revenants similar to the ones who had bothered Pheiri in the night — she recognised the skull symbol on their armour, but she couldn’t recall what that meant. They were hiding in a long, low, lightless building, a little way toward the graveworm’s kill zone. They were also heavily armed and highly organised; they had some kind of big gun on a machine. Iriko tried to sneak up on them, but they spotted her with cybernetic senses and sent chemical fires to eat at her flesh.

She gave up on that prey and slipped back toward Pheiri; she returned to a spot inside a block of apartments, about ten floors up, where she could look down at Pheiri in the street below.

She was still hungry. She was always hungry. And Pheiri had been nice. He’d let her eat the kills. That had never happened before.

Iriko squirted a fresh beam of encrypted data down toward Pheiri, virus-free and unscrambled into plain language.

「pheiri pheiri eat-share? hungry so hungry need meat lots inside lots lots more than needed? eat-share share-eat. show where more meat is waiting, offer meat offer share. please hungry small so small. share small? only small. only small. promise please please.」

Pheiri ignored the beam, rejected handshake, and replied with a blurt of wide-beam comms:

「NEGATIVE cease communications remove self 500 meters rear」

He backed up the rejection by targeting her new position with a set of rack-mounted missiles, then broadcast the chemical formula for several nasty forms of incendiary weapon and anti-surfactant, ones that even Iriko could not easily metabolise.

Iriko wanted to huff and put her hands on her hips; she thought Pheiri was a nice boy! But he was rude, and a boor, and ungentlemanly. She did not have lungs or hands or hips anymore, but she toyed with the notion of extruding a mouth so she could pout.

She sent another beam: 「talk just talk no weapons talk about meat want more you have meat give me your meat please want please. iriko iriko is me namekujin iriko please hello iriko please say」

Pheiri replied: 「NEGATIVE final warning remove self 500 meters rear open fire 15 seconds」

「so much meat! all yours! all yours! you don’t need you’re metal and plastic and a nuclear reactor why can’t I have a nuclear reactor it’s not my fault! not my fault, want meat want what you—」

Handshake crackled back up the tight-beam. Something else replied to Iriko’s tantrum, something inside Pheiri. An audio signal unspooled inside Iriko’s body.

「“We let you have the Death’s Heads, zombie. Go away or Pheiri will turn you into paste. We don’t have time to fight you right now, we do not want to engage. Do you understand? We’ll kill you if we have to. Go on, shoo.”」

The tight-beam connection cut out.

Iriko remained motionless in the tower stairwell for sixty whole seconds, long past Pheiri’s deadline. Then she slowly went limp, her bulk filling the entire stairwell landing, spilling down the stairs and up the walls and across the ceiling. She stared and stared and stared. She wanted to sob. She almost grew a throat for that express purpose.

Pheiri wasn’t trapping zombies to eat them later: he was protecting them.

Iriko let out a whine. She was so embarrassed. They’d all seen her!

Iriko pulled herself together and hurried up the stairwell. She slid through the dark interior of the apartments, over mounds of rubble and drifts of dust, ignoring the sweet temptation of mould-mats and walls caked with grey rot. She wormed her way through the top of the building, then found a sealed door for roof access. She melted through the hinges, pushed the door aside, and slid out onto the roof.

Iriko did not like exposing her body to the open sky, even armoured in refractive mail; she told herself this was because she felt vulnerable, because something might attack her from above. But that was a lie. She hated the sky. She hated the endless black clouds and the dead sun like an ember in a cold fireplace. She hated the shame of what she had become, the shape of her expanded form. When she was down in the dark and hidden below the buildings, she could pretend she was anything at all, wearing anything she liked.

But she was angry, and mortified, and embarrassed. Enough to go out onto a rooftop.

And she was hungry.

She slid to the edge of the roof. Her body soaked into the concrete, tendrils and surfaces exploring the cracks, sucking at tiny pools of moisture, and greedily digesting scraps of black mould. She peered over the concrete lip, down at Pheiri.

He stared back up at her with dozens of sensor systems. He knew exactly where she was.

She wanted to stick her tongue out at him. Rude!

Iriko could form long-range weapons if she needed to, but her body was limited to squirting chemicals or ejecting hardened darts. Neither of those would penetrate Pheiri; none of her formulas would burn or melt his suit of armour. Pheiri had not transmitted the molecular composition of his shell, and Iriko suspected the armour itself was a clever trick. It looked exactly like bone, but her sensors told her otherwise: super-dense, ultra-light, and self-regrowing, like the bone would keep expanding even when separated from blood and meat. She did not want to risk getting a piece of that inside her body.

She considered jumping from the tower and forming herself into a hardened spear, pointed at Pheiri; she’d used that trick once before to finish off something from the deeper wilds which had not been fooled into thinking she was a lump of concrete. Iriko was perhaps half or two thirds Pheiri’s size, so she could probably overwhelm him with sheer weight in a first strike. But would her spear-tip be hard enough? She experimented with copying that special super-dense bone he was wearing; she extruded a point and kept trying to harden it in new ways, but she couldn’t get past diamond.

This was so unfair! She wanted to slink away into the dark and pretend this had never happened, but the hunger was terrible and Pheiri had so much meat inside.

She peered back over the ledge and made a face at Pheiri. She hated him now. Why wouldn’t he share?

「fuckboi shit-face guilt trip fuck you fuck you fuck you!」

Pheiri replied with a blurt of pure static. Iriko flinched and backed up.

She retreated to the middle of the roof. She felt very alone and very bitter, which she had not felt in a long time. She wanted to cry, but making eyeballs and producing tears would be a waste of energy and water. Instead she found a place where the roof had collapsed inward. She picked up a huge piece of loose concrete, twenty feet across. She hefted it with a dozen pseudopods, tested the weight, and started to calculate the trajectory to hurl it onto Pheiri’s stupid head. His point defence systems would undoubtedly blast the concrete apart, but Iriko didn’t care, she wanted him to know that she hated him now. She was going to throw things at him until he moved and—

Crack-crack!

Two bullets hit Iriko’s right flank.

The first bullet was unremarkable lead; Iriko melted and digested the round instantly. But the second bullet contained a neurotransmission blocker laced into the metal, released as she began to digest the material — pointless against a zombie, almost useless against her in such a small quantity, but just clever enough to get her attention.

She traced the bullets’ trajectory; they had come from two rooftops away, amid a nest of rubble, all crumbly concrete and rusted steel bars. But there was nothing there except ambient nanomachines and inert material. Nothing scuttled away or slipped into the cracks. Where was the shooter? And why try to get her attention like that and then hide?

Iriko flowered her senses open, blanketing that distant rooftop with sheets of microwave radiation and radar returns. She scanned surfaces and topography to find anything out of the ordinary. She extended actual eyeballs on stalks, human-like and insect-like and some that she had invented herself, smearing her sight across the visual range and beyond, into infra-red and ultraviolet. She blasted the area with echolocation pings and odd-one-out predictive mapping equations, and—

Radio contact crackled across the surface of her skin, short-range, point-blank.

「Here. Look here. See me.」

A spindly, mushroom-pale hand emerged from inside a bundle of black rags. The hand waved to Iriko.

The rags had not been there before, or they had appeared to be something else, masked by irrelevance. The pale hand was joined by two more arms, a moon-like pale face half wrapped in metal, and the massive barrel of a sniper rifle.

A revenant, a little one. Beyond the graveworm line, just like the others. No skull on her clothes or flesh.

But this one was out in the open, alone, exposed.

Iriko gently lowered the chunk of concrete. She moved very slowly, so as not to alarm the revenant. She did not want it to run. She started to creep across the rooftop, toward the opposite edge. There was one building between her and the pale many-armed revenant with the sniper rifle. She could make that leap with ease; she began to gather muscular power and tension in the underside of her body.

Radio contact crackled again. The revenant said: 「Stop moving. I’ve got worse than nerve agents. Give it up.」

Iriko stopped. She replied on the same point-blank wavelength: 「out open out alone? going to get eaten. going to eat you. you run but you’re smaller and slower and you can’t stop every part of me lie down and sit down and gun down and let me come let me come let me—」

「Stop. Let’s talk like people. You’re still a person in there, right? We’re not that far from the graveworm safe zone. I can still run. Then you get to meet worm-guard. But I have a deal for you. Mutually beneficial arrangement. How would you like to eat some zombies for me?」

「eat you eat you eat you eat you eat you you you you you you you」

Across the gap, Iriko saw the revenant sigh. 「Too hungry to wait, huh? Fine. I’ll lead you there. But you don’t get any cover. You better be as quick as you look, or the Death Cult are gonna fry you.」

The revenant stood up suddenly and made her sniper rifle vanish inside her black robes. She was very tall and very spindly; Iriko sensed reactors powering up inside the revenant’s body, shedding stealth for strength and speed. She whipped around on the spot, black robes flying out behind her as she turned and scurried back across the ruined rooftop.

Iriko bunched her body like a spring and exploded from her own roof; the impact cracked the concrete behind her as she shot into the air.

She narrowed herself into an aerodynamic dart and slammed into the debris two rooftops away. Dust and shrapnel and bits of metal exploded in every direction. She unfolded herself like a net, shoving the concrete and rebar aside with all her strength, hot on the scent of fresh meat and healthy reactor spoor.

A flutter of black robe slipped around the frame of a roof-access door. Iriko gave chase; she ripped the door frame out and flung it aside and squeezed her body through the opening, rushing into the shadowy interior, sliding herself across every surface, groping for an ankle or a piece of black robe or a strand of hair.

She needn’t have bothered.

The pale, spindly revenant was standing with her back against a railing, her body relaxed and loose, less than ten feet away; behind her was the drop straight down the middle of the stairwell.

Iriko reached for her.

The revenant flicked off a salute, kicked off the floor, and rolled herself backward over the railing. She dropped right down the empty centre of the stairwell, head first. Iriko was so surprised that for two precious seconds she did not follow; she just peered down the stairwell, watching the falling comet of black rag and mushroom-pale flesh.

Iriko leapt.

The revenant landed first, twisting herself like a cat, springy limbs absorbing the shock; she bounced from a standing start and shot through a set of doors without even pausing to look. Iriko landed a second later and splattered all over the inside of the stairwell’s ground floor. She had to spend five seconds pulling herself back together and making sure she didn’t leave any parts behind. Then she slammed through the doors as well. She was losing her temper.

Down a long dark corridor, the ruddy daylight flickering through the windows; across an open court with markings for a ball game, dodging in out and between the quiet husks of dead machines; through the frontage of a building that had once served food, the trays and tables and bins now empty of anything but dust. The strange spindly revenant ran just a little too fast for Iriko, always a few meters beyond reach, always with some new trick to duck or jink or dive out of the way. Iriko shattered walls and tossed furniture aside and chewed at the floor in her frustration.

Eventually the revenant crossed an open stretch of street and plunged into a long, low, lightless building. Iriko powered after her, slamming doors off their hinges, ignoring the switchback corners of the corridor, and smashing straight through a concrete wall.

Iriko recognised the building a moment too late; this was the place the well-armed, extra-clever, skull-wearing zombies were staging their weapon with which to attack Pheiri. When she’d tried to creep upon them from above, they’d spotted her instantly and turned their weapons upon her. And she had just shattered the concrete wall which led to their big chamber.

The bulk of her body had too much momentum to stop; she exploded through the wall and slammed down into a big room with hoops at either end and markings all over the floor. She started to rear up to pull herself back, to escape the inevitable chemical repellents and flame weapons and protective sprays, and—

And all the skull-wearing revenants were looking away from her.

Some of them had been knocked down by the wall she’d shattered. All the others were exchanging small arms fire with a pale, spindly, black-wrapped figure up on a gantry. They were shouting insults at the pale revenant, shouting orders at each other — and then turning in shock, their faces covered in concrete dust and blood, to stare at the multi-ton blob monster which had ambushed them from a new and unexpected direction.

Iriko fell upon them, as quickly as she could.

When she was done sucking flesh from bones, and breaking bones to suck out marrow, and sucking bones deep inside herself to be digested, she felt a radio broadcast crackle over her skin once again.

The pale, spindly, clever revenant up on the gantry said: 「Good work. Said I would lead you to meat.」

Iriko replied: 「not for you not you not for you」

「Hmm? Not for me?」

「pheiri pheiri. big gun make him scared make him rude and bad boy bad for me bad for him. bad zombies get eaten so no pheiri rudeness bad」

Up on the gantry the revenant produced her sniper rifle again and looked through the scope, at the big mess Iriko had made. 「Oh, the lance. Mm, whatever you say. That tank is more than capable of dealing with low grade AT weaponry.」

Iriko picked up a piece of the big gun — she’d broken it while she’d been eating — and waved it at the woman on the gantry. She tried to make a rude gesture, but she didn’t have the fingers to make it work.

The woman laughed anyway, a muffled metallic chuckle from behind a steel half-mask painted with big black teeth. 「No offence. Now, do we have a deal, or are you going to chase me again?」

「deal deal? deal eat deal?」

「More meat. For you. If you want it. All you need to do is be in the right spot and wait. My name is Serin. Does that help? What’s yours?」

「iriko iriko iriko. not me not anyway anymore namekujin joke bad bad joke because I’m iriko」

The woman leaned against the gantry. Her eyes looked sad. 「That’s not a name. That’s just what you’ve become. Am I right?」

「eat you」

「You’re welcome to try. Pheiri might not like that.」

Iriko pulled herself as small as she could and made her refractive armour the same colour as the floor. 「know pheiri know pheiri say hello say from me me me not here not from me not pretend say?」

The woman chuckled again. 「I can pass on a message. From a secret admirer. If we have a deal. Do we have a deal, Iriko?」

「eat」

「I’ll take that as a yes. Follow me.」

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A 100% accurate depiction of the events of the Interlude chapter.

(The image above is by ray, over on the discord! It had me howling with laughter, and I just had to share it with more readers. Thank you so much for letting me share it here, ray!)

Surprise, it’s an interlude! A squishy, squirmy, slimy, sticky, slippery interlude. Slug girls. Woo. I wasn’t actually sure if this interlude was going to come here, or later in the story, but this ended up as the perfect moment to explore a bit beyond the boundaries of the graveworm safe zone. I’m sure we’ll see more of Iriko (and Serin, again), in the future. Next chapter we’re onto arc 9 for real.

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And as always, thank you so much for reading my little story! I dearly hope you are enjoying Necroepilogos, and these strange places we’re going, as much as I am enjoying writing about them. Until next chapter!

Content Warnings

Discussion of suicide
Suicidal ideation
Suicide attempt – technically(?)
Self harm

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“Because you’re mine, Pira.”

Elpida did not elaborate.

Pira’s eyes burned, blue lightning in a bloodless face, striking across the narrow gap of Pheiri’s control cockpit. Cold embers of the undead sunrise crawled through Pheiri’s tiny viewing port; the reddish light rekindled the fire in Pira’s flame-coloured hair. Her wounded body was a naked offering in the electric gloom.

Pira croaked: “That’s not an answer. You should shoot me, Elpida. Or have me shot, if you can’t do it yourself.”

Howl chuckled in the back of Elpida’s head. Stubborn cunt, isn’t she? Let me at her?

Not yet, Elpida replied. I think I finally understand her.

Huh. Good luck?

Ilyusha hissed through her teeth, uncoiling from her seat, tail lifting from the floor — but Elpida put out one hand to stop her. Pira would not respond well to the blunt instrument of Ilyusha’s outrage and aggression; she would clam up, close down, and fight back. Elpida needed to be like a heated scalpel, to remove Pira’s gangrenous flesh.

Elpida said, “Yes, Pira, I agree with that. I should kill you.”

Bold, Howl snorted. Don’t actually do it though, hey?

No promises.

… Elps? Fucking—

Elpida continued: “You’re a liability, Pira. You kept secrets from me and from the group, not just personal matters, but practical secrets, information which might have made the difference between our collective survival and our individual deaths. Despite that, you took specific actions which have reaffirmed my trust in your intentions — but not in your judgement. I want to make that clear. I do not trust your judgement, Pira. I do not trust that you’re telling me the whole truth even now, no matter how broken you are. You willingly joined a group that represents the worst possible way to respond to this nightmare of an afterlife. You’ve been down to the bottom, all the way down, and I can guess what you’re capable of. You shot me in a moment of a panic, a foolish decision which nearly got us all killed, or captured, or worse.”

Pira frowned. The bandages and dressings on her face crinkled in a new way; adhesive pulled at the pale flesh of her cheek and throat. “Then what—”

Elpida spoke over her. “And I would kill you, if I were a Death’s Head, or a Covenanter, or perhaps if our positions were reversed and you were standing judgement over me. But I’m none of those things. I am a daughter of Telokopolis. I am Telokopolis, a living piece of the city, still standing. While one of us stands, the city lives. Telokopolis is eternal; it will never die. And Telokopolis offers a better way.”

Pira hissed, “This is nonsense. Nothing but words. Just—”

Elpida raised her voice, filling the control cockpit with command. “Your decision to shoot me in the gut was born from lack of trust — lack of trust in me. But the mistake was not yours alone. It was also mine.”

Pira squinted. “What?”

Elpida kept her voice level and hard. “I failed you, Pira. I failed to earn your trust. I failed to make my case. I was derelict in my duties as your Commander. In a moment of panic and indecision, I failed to guide you. Your mistakes and errors and failures are mine to bear.” Elpida pointed at her own stomach, at the layers of bandage and gauze and stitches behind the fabric of her tomb-grey t-shirt. “This may as well be self-inflicted.”

Pira tried to scoff, but she hadn’t the energy. “Absurd. I pointed the gun, I pulled the trigger, I—”

“You. Are. Mine.”

The jumbled surfaces and screens of Pheiri’s control cockpit absorbed the whip crack of Elpida’s voice; the additional effort had made her stomach wound spike with pain, but she swallowed her wince. Ilyusha flinched in her seat, talons scraping on metal. Pira blinked, eyes wavering. Was she about to break? Elpida had barely pushed; she hadn’t even spelled out the equation yet, the retroactive responsibility for Pira’s actions, as her Commander. She had led this particular dance half a dozen times in the past, in life, with her cadre, even with—

Howl? Elpida thought. I hear you panting. You alright?

Howl snapped: I’m not fucking crying!

Didn’t say you were.

Just … fuck, Elps! Fucking, this? Really? For her?

She’s my responsibility. You said it yourself, she’s one of my girls now. She took the deal and followed her orders.

But-

Leave nobody behind. I did this for you, too, Howl. I did this for all the cadre, collectively, and for some of you individually, over half a dozen different matters, even when you didn’t deserve it, even when it was stupid and I didn’t want to. This is what it means to be in Command. Your failures are my failures, your transgressions are my transgressions. And Pira didn’t need much, she’s already there.

Howl sniffed, loudly. Yeah, yeah. Get on with it. This is ugly.

Elpida went on: “You’re alive because you’re mine, Pira, because you belong to Telokopolis. You’re alive because I was there when you needed me, and you accepted me. You’re alive because you’re one of my girls now. You’re alive because I say so, because I order it, and because I am your Commander.”

Pira’s lips curled — disgust, a last bastion raised in haste. “These are all just empty words, Elpida.”

“Commander.”

Pira snorted. “Elpida. You don’t even know what to do with me. You don’t—”

Howl rose up Elpida’s throat and took hold of Elpida’s voice.

“Elps might not,” Howl said. “But I sure fuckin’ do.”

Pira froze, blue eyes gone cold as ancient ice. Ilyusha leaned forward in her seat to look at Elpida’s face.

Howl? Elpida asked. What are you doing?

This bitch is almost as stubborn as you, Elps. You’ll be here all day. Let me ride her for a bit, pretty please? I won’t make her too sore, promise.

Fine. Go ahead.

Howl peeled Elpida’s lips back in a wide and whirling grin.

Pira hissed: “You again. The other personality. From the infirmary.”

Howl said: “Yeah! Hi there, bitch cakes. You gonna keep being a bad girl? Need a good hard fuck-spank before you sit down and do as you’re told? Or are you gonna keep throwing a tantrum until reality gives up and spits you out? ‘Cos that’s all I see here. A little baby bitch tantrum. Wah-wah-wah, sucks to be you. Sucks to get picked up by somebody who won’t let you go, right? No matter how badly you screw up? When all you wanna do is wallow in how sad and defeated you are? Boo-hoo-hoo.”

Pira asked, “Who are you?”

Elpida resumed control. “This is Howl, one of my dead sisters. She doesn’t think very highly of you.”

Howl snapped: “No kidding! You think Elps would cast me out if I shot her in the gut? No! She’d smack me upside the head and call me a bad girl, but I’d still be here. Because I’m hers. Because we all were! We all are!”

Pira stammered: “Y-you have no reason to keep me—”

“Alive!?” Howl cackled — Elpida’s own voice ringing out against the inside of Pheiri’s hull. “You wanna die so bad, do it yourself!”

Howl reached out with Elpida’s hand and picked up Elpida’s submachine gun. She opened the breech to show a round in the chamber, closed it with a metallic clack, and then offered the gun to Pira, grip first.

Pira stared at the weapon. Her brow furrowed. Her lips twitched.

Howl’s hand shook; Elpida had to take control to steady her own fingers.

Howl, she said. You shouldn’t offer this if you don’t mean it.

Elps, shut up!

You’re copying what I did with Ilyusha, but you won’t let Pira shoot herself, not really. You’re not prepared to see it through. This is just a stunt.

And you would?! Howl raged. You’d let her blow her brains out?!

If I offered it, I would mean it. You can’t fake this, Howl.

Then fucking help me!

Elpida sighed — with her own mouth — and re-assumed control of her body. She kept the gun extended toward Pira, to keep the offer open. She said: “Pira, Howl is being stupid about this, but she’s making an important point. I can’t actually stop you from killing yourself.”

Pira looked up from the gun. Her eyes were a blue void.

Elpida said: “Back there in the Death’s Head skyscraper you could have easily gone through with it, killed Ooni and then killed yourself. But you didn’t, because I turned up in time and told you not to. But that’s all I did — told you not to. I was weak and wounded, I wouldn’t have been able to wrestle the guns away from you, and the others weren’t committed. You could have done it, but you chose to listen to me. All I have now is words. You could leave us, when everyone else is sleeping. You could steal a knife and open your veins. But you didn’t. You’re still here. And I’m confident that you don’t actually want to die. All I have is words, but the decision to follow me is yours. I can only save you if you say yes, but I think you’ve already said it.”

Pira’s gaze dropped back to the gun. She reached out with one hand and took the grip. She tapped her index finger just above the trigger.

Fuuuckkkk, Howl gurgled. Fuck! Elps, I’m sorry, I—

Trust me.

Pira was still for a long time, one finger extended above the trigger. Her knuckles turned white with pressure. She didn’t breathe. Her wounds, her sallow, pale, drained complexion, her sagging musculature, the dark rings around her eyes — she looked like a corpse about to collapse.

Ilyusha gritted her teeth so hard that Elpida heard her molars creak. Pheiri’s control cockpit hissed and buzzed, almost below the level of human hearing. Deep in his belly the nuclear heartbeat throbbed, keeping time with Elpida’s pulse.

Elpida counted sixty three seconds. Her arm began to tire, but she did not waver. She would respect Pira’s choice.

Sixty four seconds. Sixty five seconds. Pira’s trigger finger twitched. Sixty six. Sixty seven.

Pira let go of the gun.

Her hand was shaking; she flexed the knuckles and returned it to her lap, limp and spent. She cast her eyes toward the floor. She started to cry again, slow and silent.

Elpida lowered the gun and suppressed her own sigh of relief. Ilyusha hissed, hard and restless.

Elpida said: “Thank you, Pira. I’m glad you’re going to stay with us.”

Pira shook her head. “I don’t deserve this.”

Elpida said, “It doesn’t matter if you deserve it or not. That’s not for you to decide.”

Pira squeezed a sob through clenched teeth. “You can’t be serious. You can’t forgive—”

Howl snorted, taking control of Elpida’s words again: “Forgive?! I didn’t hear anyone say that word. Did you? Illy? Elps? Am I hearing fuckin’ voices here? Is Pheiri growing speakers and chatting with us now?”

Ilyusha snorted too; Elpida thought that sounded forced.

Pira raised her head, tears running down her cheeks. She looked so lost.

Howl went on: “The Commander’s not offering you forgiveness, you dozy bitch. You don’t even want it! You’d never take it, not of your own accord! If she offered then you’d be disgusted by her, right? I know I would! Ha!”

The last flakes of brittle crust fell away from Pira’s expression. Wide eyes wept freely. “I … yes … I would.”

Elpida said: “Howl, I can take it from here. Settle down.”

Any time, Commander, Howl giggled. Got her all fluffed and prepped for you. Have fun with the juicy core.

Elpida ignored the sex joke — it was Howl’s way of dealing with her own discomfort. She put Howl from her mind for now. She focused on Pira.

Blue eyes hung in the gloom, wet and wasted. Pira’s final walls had fallen.

Elpida straightened up and put the firearm in her own lap. “Pira, I am not offering you forgiveness. I’m not giving you that choice, because I don’t trust your judgement. You have the choice to run, to leave us behind, because I cannot stop that, and you have the choice to kill yourself — though I am ordering you not to do so. But you don’t have a choice of forgiveness. It’s not yours to reject.”

Pira’s eyes widened; she must have realised what Elpida was about to say. “N-no, Elpi— C-Commander, no—”

“You are forgiven, because it is my choice, not yours. Your mistake is noted. Forgiveness is your punishment.” Elpida indicated her own gut again. “And you owe me, for this. If we were not nanomachine zombies, then this gut wound would have killed me. Then, despite that, I stopped you from killing Ooni and yourself. You owe me three lives. The sum of the debt is you, yourself.”

Pira tried to swallow; she coughed, choking on her own saliva. She shook her head.

Elpida said, “You reject the debt?”

“No, no, I … I can’t be trusted.”

“Because you used to be a Death’s Head?”

Pira said, “No, not that. Because I don’t believe in anything anymore. Elpida. Commander, I didn’t turn against the Death’s Head ideology. I already explained that. I just stopped believing in anything at all. The old gods from when I was alive, the new ideals from The Fortress, the Death’s Heads, everything in between. None of it means anything in this place, living like this. This isn’t even life, just ashes. All fires have gone out. How can I believe in anything?”

Elpida smiled. “You believe in not eating other people. You believe in rejecting predatory cannibalism.”

Pira winced, slow and wounded. “I reject the premise of survival at any cost. It’s the only way to resist.”

“To resist what?” Elpida knew the answer, but she wanted Pira to put it into words.

Pira gestured with her bionic hand. The arm was badly dented. She indicated nothing and everything. “All of this. Whoever made it. Whoever keeps it going. I used to believe that we might grow strong, or build a home, or use power to strike back at … at what?” Pira sobbed once, harder than Elpida had expected. “At dust and echoes? At shadows on the wall? There is no amount of cannibalism that can protect us. Refusal is the only true choice.”

Ilyusha grunted: “Sounds like belief. To me. Huh.”

Pira shook her head. “It’s a rejection of belief.”

Elpida said, “The only winning move is to remove oneself from the game. If that is the case, I have one more question for you.”

Pira sobbed. “Don’t.”

“Why do you keep coming back?”

Pira squeezed her eyes shut as hard as she could, tears leaking out between the darkened creases of her skin. Her every muscle was pulled tight despite her wounds; perhaps she was trying to keep herself from bursting.

“Pira?”

“I’m so tired,” Pira hissed through her teeth. “I want this to be over. I want this to end. But it won’t. I don’t have the choice anymore. I can’t make it end, I can’t stop, because I made a deal.”

Pira had mentioned this once before; the first resurrection, from life to revenant, was free and without consent, but subsequent resurrections required the zombie in question to give a reason to the machines, to the nanomachine ecosystem, or to whatever directing mind lay behind all this software. Pira had been unable to describe the feeling or sensation when she’d previously spoken on this subject. She had claimed that after death everything was different.

Elpida clarified: “A deal to come back, the first time you die here, the first time you die as a zombie. You have to give a reason to keep going. Is that correct?”

Pira nodded. “Wasn’t the first time, though. Changed over time. Refined it. Got angry.”

“What deal did you make, Pira?”

Pira shook her head. “Can’t put it into words. It’s not something you understand in words. Can’t explain how it feels.”

“Try.”

Pira went very still and very quiet, breathing hard and rough. “Promised to … to try to … tear it all down.”

“Promised who?”

Pira hissed: “I don’t know.”

“Okay, Pira, relax. Stop thinking about it now.” Elpida took a deep breath and let it out slowly, for Pira to mirror. Pira obeyed, shivering and whimpering, wincing with little pains, like unclenching a fist held tight for far too long. Ilyusha grimaced and nudged Elpida in the ribs; Elpida gave her a placating look and mouthed ‘almost there, don’t worry.’

Elpida’s mind was full of strange coincidences. Pieces were slotting into place.

After a few moments of silence, Elpida said: “Pira, can you believe in me?”

Pira opened her eyes and stared at nothing. “Why?” she murmured. “What for? What’s your plan, Commander? What plan can you possibly have?”

“I thought you liked my plans,” Elpida said. “You complimented the general direction in which I was going, before you shot me in the gut.”

“You had a plan and it failed.”

Elpida laughed, big and open; that made her own gut hurt, but she ignored the pain. Ilyusha and Pira both frowned at her.

Elpida said: “What, because the combat frame didn’t get up first try? Because we stumbled and fell? Because you shot me? That’s just what happens sometimes. Plans fail. People die. Cities fall. But not Telokopolis. You know why? Because here I am.” She spread her hands. “We got the group back together, we recovered our missing members. We’re here, we’re alive and breathing — or at least undead. And while we can think and move and speak, we can make new plans. It’s that, it’s always that, or give up.”

“I— I want to give up. I want to be dead.”

“I don’t think you really do,” Elpida said. “We need you, Pira. I need you. I need your skills and experience, your knowledge of the nanomachine ecosystem, your combat abilities, your advice, your support, your trigger finger. And now that I understand you, I also want the promise, the deal, whatever it was you made with the system or the machines or the gravekeepers.”

“W-what?”

“I want you to make a new deal, with me. I want you to transfer that promise. I want you to fight for me even if you don’t believe in me. I want you to accept that I am your Commander, I am your judgement.”

Pira’s tears dried in her eyes. She stared at Elpida, mystified. “Why?”

Elpida leaned back in her chair and allowed herself a smile. It was only half performance. “Because the graveworm knows who I am. Because I’ve got a Necromancer who talks to me via sleep paralysis, who wore my face to get into that combat frame. Because a combat frame fell from the heavens when I was resurrected. Because we’re sitting in a treasure trove of information and firepower.” She reached out and patted the bare grey metal of Pheiri’s innards. “Because Pheiri here was within driving distance, out of an entire continent-spanning city. Because Ooni was here, near the tomb in which you were resurrected. Because you were here at all — a zombie who made a deal to start wrecking the system, resurrected alongside me. Because of messages inside my coffin, and coincidences I cannot explain.”

Pira tried to laugh, but the sound was hollow. “Messianic delusion.”

“It’s not delusion,” Elpida said. “I’m starting to disbelieve all these coincidences. I’m starting to believe that we’ve been assisted — or at least I’ve been assisted — by something we can’t see yet. You want to access the fulcrum of the world, Pira? You want to tear down whatever this is? Stick with me and you might just get to see it. You know why?”

Pira swallowed. “Because you think you’ve been chosen.”

Elpida shook her head. “No. That part doesn’t matter. Whatever I was chosen for, I refuse it. My purpose is my cadre. My purpose is to be your Commander.”

Pira stared, no longer crying, her face naked and raw. She did not sit straight, but no longer did she shiver beneath her armoured coat.

Pira whispered to herself. The words were just loud enough for Elpida to hear: “Never give up. Never stop. Never lie down.”

Elpida decided it was now or never. She put her submachine gun aside on one of Pheiri’s many control panels, and turned to Ilyusha. “Illy, do you have a knife on you? May I please borrow it?”

Ilyusha pulled a sheathed combat knife from the side of her torn-up tomb-trousers.

“Thank you, Illy,” Elpida said. She accepted the knife, stood up, and rolled back her left sleeve.

Pira’s eyes widened. “Commander?”

Elpida drew the combat knife and handed the sheath back to Ilyusha. The blade was black and clean, drinking the thin reddish dawn from Pheiri’s tiny window. Elpida flexed her left hand and held the knife in her right.

“Pira, you and I made a deal, back when we had a fistfight. I offered you my blood in place of cannibalised flesh. You agreed in principle, but we never sealed the pact.”

“Commander. Commander, no, I’m not—”

“Elpida,” said Elpida. “It’s Elpida again now.” She raised her palm and the knife. “You’re badly injured and you need to heal. And I need you to know that you are mine. This blood is given freely, willingly; this is not an act of exploitation. Are you ready?”

Pira’s lips parted with a wet click. She was panting softly. She gave a very tiny nod.

Elpida quickly drew the blade across the meat of her own left palm. Pain blossomed a split second before the blood. The flesh parted and the crimson flowed, pooling in the shallow grail of her metacarpals.

She lowered her hand toward Pira’s waiting lips. Pira grasped her with fluttering fingertips at knuckles and wrist. She touched her pale lips to the side of Elpida’s palm. Her eyes fluttered shut. Her throat trembled. Scarlet blood slid into Pira’s mouth, sluicing over her tongue, smeared around her lips.

Pira drank, pale throat bobbing, until the flow weakened to a trickle. She took little more than a few thimble’s worth of blood; Elpida’s circulatory system was host to enhanced clotting agents and specialised platelet structures, another blessing of Telokopolan genetic engineering. She had no doubt that Pira would derive scant material benefit from the nanomachines which comprised her blood. A poor meal compared to a single bite of corpse-meat — or even better, fresh brains — but blood meant more than nano-mould or empty air. And the nutrition was a secondary purpose.

Pira let go, hands quivering, eyelids heavy. Elpida withdrew. Pira sagged in her seat, smears of blood on her lips and chin. She dropped her eyes toward the floor.

“No,” Elpida said. “Be proud.”

Pira straightened up. Eyes to the front. Wiped her chin and licked her lips. Hardly full of energy, but not looking so sorry for herself anymore.

“Good girl,” said Elpida.

Elpida flexed her left hand. The pain wasn’t too bad. She would heal quickly, what with all the raw blue nanomachines already inside her body. She allowed two droplets of blood to fall from the edge of her palm and land on the metal deck: a symbolic offering for Pheiri. She would explain it to him later.

She sat down and went to hand the knife back to Ilyusha, but she found Illy staring at the bloody split in her palm. Ilyusha’s claws were extended, crimson razors at all her fingertips. Her tail silently flicked back and forth.

Elpida extended her left hand. “Don’t be jealous. Here, Illy.”

Ilyusha bared her teeth, blushing as red as the blood. “I don’t—”

“You clearly do, Illy. Take it.”

Ilyusha snapped: “Don’t need it!”

“You know that’s beside the point. Clean my hand. Go ahead.”

Ilyusha relented, squirming and blushing. She clicked her claws away and then lifted Elpida’s wound toward her mouth; she licked the blood from the creases in Elpida’s palm. Her tongue was small and raspy. Elpida winced.

Gritty raindrops trickled down Pheiri’s tiny steel-glass window; it was still raining, a cold and wet day in hell. Tiny machine sounds clicked and whirred from deep inside his body. Ilyusha licked and lapped until the wound began to close. Pira said nothing, her eyes finally at peace, blue skies after a storm. Elpida considered the fact that three of her companions had now consumed her own blood.

Hoping that’s gonna be a trend? Howl chuckled.

Not sure. Can I produce blood faster if I modify myself? Maybe.

Bloodbag. Ha.

Eventually Ilyusha finished cleaning Elpida’s hand. Elpida reached over with her other and stroked Ilyusha’s messy blonde hair, smoothing it over her skull. She said: “Good girl.”

Ilyusha closed her eyes and purred.

They sat together in silence for a while longer.

Eventually Pira asked a question. A croaking voice from a bone dry throat, but no longer wet with tears: “Commander, what is your plan? This isn’t a rhetorical or philosophical question. I’m asking for practical answers. What do we do now?”

Elpida said, “Short, medium, or long term?”

Pira raised her eyebrows. Had she not expected such detail? “Long term. Give me the wide view.”

Elpida leaned back in her chair, flexing her left hand, savouring the sharp, shallow pain of the cut. “We have two long term strategic options. One: head back toward the graveworm and attempt to make contact, with the intention of obtaining access to the nanomachine production facilities inside. Can we get past the worm-guard? I have no idea. Has the graveworm really been speaking to me? Howl?”

I’m no worm, Elps, Howl snorted. How would I be? Don’t you remember what that moon-bitch said?

Moon bitch? You mean Kagami?

Yeah! You can’t broadcast shit through Pheiri’s hull unless he invites it. It’s bone-mesh, remember? How can I be the graveworm if I’m talking to you now?

That Necromancer managed to broadcast through Pheiri’s hull.

You had a nightmare! And I’m not a worm!

Elpida trusted Howl, at least about this. She shrugged so Pira and Ilyusha could see. “Unknown. We would need to test the worm-guard, at the very least. I’m no longer certain that they were intentionally waiting for me on the combat frame. That may have been the Necromancer’s doing. I would also need to re-attempt contact with the graveworm itself. Option one may not be possible, not without the combat frame to put us on an even footing.”

Ilyusha hissed: “Big fucker. Yeah. Too big.”

Pira said: “Option two, we leave?”

Elpida nodded. “Correct. Option two: we strike out, away from the graveworm, toward one of two destinations. The first possible target is one of those three towers you’re so interested in, Pira, where you think we might be able to meet plenty of Necromancers, or find some kind of control systems.” Elpida shook her head. “In theory Pheiri can make the journey, he’s survived beyond the graveworm safe zones for a very long time, but when we turn up at a tower we’re just a bunch of zombies. One Necromancer froze me on the spot, like I was a puppet. If you’re right about those towers, I don’t fancy our chances, not as we currently are.”

Pira frowned. “What’s the other destination?”

Elpida smiled. “Telokopolis. You weren’t there when we saw the ‘satellite’ photos in the tomb, but the city is there, right where the plateau should be. Dead or undead or ruins, it exists. And it will live again.”

Pira laughed, a single huff without humour. “A journey into the depths.”

Elpida nodded again. “Thousands of miles. Ten thousand. More. I asked Pheiri about this briefly, while you were unconscious, and he’s never managed to reach the hypothetical position of Telokopolis. It lies far beyond the usual circuits of the graveworms, past layers of the city he’s never penetrated. You and I can review his data together, Pira. You’ve been out there beyond the worms too, so I want you to compare notes, let me know if you think it’s feasible.”

“Does Pheiri?”

Elpida sighed. “He didn’t give me a straight answer.”

Pira swallowed. “Die at the towers or die in the wastes. You don’t even know what you’d find at Telokopolis, Elpida. An empty shell.”

Ilyusha grunted: “We’ll make it. We will!”

Elpida held out a hand; she ignored the pain of Pira’s reasonable doubt. “All of this depends on the combat frame. If we can get that online, we have a much greater chance of survival, whichever option we choose. But I doubt we can. I think it’s damaged in some fundamental way, or it would be up and moving under the pilot’s own power, or by itself if the pilot is too wounded.” She shook her head. “I have to get in there and take a look.”

Pira said: “That’s your short term plan?”

Elpida said: “Yes. Our long term direction depends on short-term results. Before we even choose, we need to recover Kagami and Vicky, and I have to … ” Elpida took a deep breath. “I have to decide what to do about the pilot inside that frame.”

Ilyusha hung her head. “She’s fucked.”

Elpida felt a pang of terrible loss for a woman she had not yet met. “If we had an atmospherically sealed hardshell, we could help her get into it somehow. The combat frame should be able to flush itself, chamber by chamber. If we could get a hardshell into the pilot chamber, and if she wasn’t wounded … ”

If, if, if; Elpida’s mind tried to plan ahead with resources she did not possess.

Pira said slowly: “Even if we could secure some kind of atmospheric suit, the suit itself would be contaminated. Do you understand?”

Elpida actually smiled; there was Pira’s usual frost, almost back to normal, despite her near nudity and the wounds all over her body. “I believe I do.”

Pira said: “Everything is contaminated. A suit itself would be made of nanomachines. The entire biosphere, the ground, the dirt. Concrete, wood, everything. Every surface. Every cubic inch of air. That pilot will die the second she’s removed from that tube.”

Elpida said, “I know. But I would like to see if there’s any other options.”

Ilyusha chuckled: “Send her back to space!”

Elpida said, “Maybe. So that’s the short term plan — as soon as I’m recovered enough, we’re going to travel back to the combat frame.”

“How?” Pira demanded. “Right past the Death’s Heads again?”

Elpida shook her head. “Small numbers, travelling light. Perhaps just me and Hafina, for stealth. I haven’t decided yet. The Necromancer may attempt to waylay us again at the hatch, to gain access to the combat frame — but Haf’s not a nanomachine zombie, she can’t be paralysed or controlled in the same way. She’s our trump card there. I think.”

Ilyusha looked up with a toothy grin. Pira blinked in surprise. “I didn’t think of that.”

Elpida continued: “We’ll recover Kagami and Vicky, do what we can for the pilot, and try to reactivate the combat frame. I’m doubtful that will work, but we have to try. Once that succeeds or fails, we can make a decision from there.” Elpida pointed at Pira. “Kagami does want me to shoot you, by the way.”

Pira grunted. “Not surprised.”

“She may attempt it herself. She did warn me that you might be a traitor, and in a way she was right. Expect gloating, possibly worse. I’ll do what I can.”

Pira’s eyebrows climbed. She seemed genuinely impressed.

Ilyusha said: “How do we pick? Elpi, how do we choose what to do?”

Elpida said, “We’ll discuss it, with all of us in one place. Pheiri too. I’m the Commander, but that doesn’t mean my orders come from above. They come from all of us.”

Pira said, voice cold: “Voting. Hm.”

“But before that,” Elpida said. “We need intel.” Her lips curled in a new kind of smile. She stretched out her legs across the control cockpit and felt the dressings tugging at the edges of her gut wound. She invited the pain. “There’s no sense deciding what to do until we can get a better view of the board. We can’t see far as pawns.”

Pira frowned. “What?”

Ilyusha said, “Ehh? Pawns?”

Elpida explained. “I’ve been putting it together in the back of my mind, ever since I got captured by the Death’s Heads. Actually I started a little before that, the moment I saw that Necromancer wearing my own face.”

Pffft, Howl snorted. You mean I’ve been putting it together, in the back of your mind, for you. Don’t shit on staff work, Elps!

You get all the real credit, Howl.

Don’t you forget it!

“We’re pawns,” Elpida said. “Everything I said earlier, all the strange coincidences. Combine all of that with the things the Necromancer said to Vicky and Kagami, and the information it apparently passed to that group of Death’s Heads. Put all of that together. We’re pawns in a game — or in a system — which we cannot understand from the inside. We don’t know which way to move because we don’t know the consequences — toward the graveworm, or the towers, or to—” the corpse of “—Telokopolis? And I’m not just talking literally, I’m talking about the motivations and agendas of things so far above us that we can barely glimpse them. So. We need the eyes of somebody who can see the game board, or at least a little higher than us.”

“A Necromancer,” Pira croaked. “How? How can you even contact it, let alone coerce it?”

Elpida said: “We don’t have to. Because there’s somebody else the Necromancer has been talking to, a whole lot more than it’s been talking to us.”

Ilyusha’s eyes lit up. “Yeah! Yeah! Fuck!”

Pira went cold and still. “You’re not suggesting we … ?”

“Yes, I am suggesting that,” Elpida said. “Combat frame or not, once we have Vicky and Kagami back with us, I propose an extraction operation. I propose we kidnap and interrogate the leader of that Death’s Head group, before the graveworm moves on and this temporary watering hole dries up. A smash and grab, to get answers from Yola.”

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Come in from the cold, Pira. Even zombie flesh will freeze solid eventually. You don’t have to do this alone anymore; the Commander has you now.

Well! End of arc 8! This actually went to some slightly unexpected places over the course of the arc, both Elpida and other characters drove the story in a couple of directions I did not expect. I’ll be honest, my original notes assumed that rehabilitating Ooni would go horribly wrong, she was supposed to end up trying to escape, but Elpida put a stop to that in ways I had not planned for. And now the cadre is (almost) all back together, Elpida is healing up nicely, and she’s got some bold plans in mind.

Next chapter I may have a little surprise for you! An unexpected POV perhaps, or maybe an interlude, if the time is right. Wait and see!

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And thank you so much for reading. Thank you for reading Necroepilogos! I dearly hope you’re all enjoying it as much as I am. We have such sights to show you, out there in the ashen darknes. Until next chapter!

Content Warnings

References to suicide
Cannibalism/body horror (you know, the usual)

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“The Fortress. The name was a statement of intent. An ideal. An aspiration. A utopian dream. The concept was simple, easy to explain, easy to share, easy to make other revenants believe in it, even the ones who had spent years eating each other in the ruins, the lost and the mad. A Fortress, for all who wished protection. Perhaps it was like that refrain you keep repeating, Commander — ‘Telokopolis is forever’. For us, in the early days, we were The Fortress, even before we had physical walls. The Fortress was self-evident. If it did not exist, it would come into being, somebody would create it. It had to exist, logically. We would take the fortress in our hearts and make it real.”

Pira spoke slowly. Her voice was a grave-whisper among the quiet machines and brooding screens of Pheiri’s control cockpit. She stared at nothing, eyes seeing into the past, brief tears dried on her freckled cheeks. The motion of speaking made the bandages and gauze on her face and jaw crinkle and flex, cracking the thin film of dried blood. Her flame-red hair had gone dull and spent. She was held together with stitches, half-naked beneath her armoured coat, listing to one side in her seat.

Black drizzle ran down the tiny steel-glass view-slit, full of grit and grime. Thin rain obscured the reddish corpse-light of the undead sunrise.

Elpida sat straight, nursing the ache in her gut, waiting for Pira to continue. Despite the protection and insulation of Pheiri’s body she felt oddly cold; she was glad she’d dragged on a fresh t-shirt and worn her coat. Her submachine gun lay within reach, atop a nearby control panel. The weapon was unnecessary but she left it in the open as a statement.

Ilyusha sat quietly in her own chair, clawed feet drawn up onto the seat, talons grasping the metal lip, tail coiled against the floor. The readouts and monitors in the control cockpit remained muted and dim. The reactor’s heartbeat throbbed far below the deck. Distant sounds inside Pheiri’s body turned soft and furtive.

Pira paused for a long time. Elpida began to worry that Pira had fallen asleep with her eyes open.

“Pira?”

“I’m awake,” Pira murmured. “This is difficult. The memories are brittle.”

Elpida said: “In your own time. That’s one thing we have plenty of, right now.”

Pira nodded slowly.

Elpida added, “But, Pira?”

Pira raised her eyes. Sky-blue, scoured clean. “Mm?”

Elpida said, “This is an interrogation. Do you understand? You can take as long as you need. You can take a break, go back to sleep. You can drink, we can even find you something to eat. But you will tell me everything.”

Pira blinked. “No more secrets,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything I know. Everything I can.”

Elpida smiled. “I’m gonna trust you to do that. Before you continue I want to clarify something. Ooni calls you ‘Leuca’. Do you want us to call you that as well, or are you Pira?”

A slow wince travelled across Pira’s face. “Leuca. That was my name in life. I discarded it, after … ”

She trailed off. Her eyes returned to the shadows.

“Pira, then,” Elpida said.

“Pira was my mother’s name. I think. Cleaner than my own. Not so … tainted.”

Elpida shared a curious glance with Ilyusha, raising an eyebrow in silent question. Illy just shrugged and pulled a grimace. She didn’t know what that meant either.

Pira continued. Her voice was a grinding rasp.

“The Fortress began with six of us. We were resurrected together, in the same tomb. A much larger tomb than the one we were in, Commander.”

“Larger?” Elpida interrupted gently. “I thought they were all the same.”

“The basic internal layout and external shape, yes. I mean the yield.”

Ilyusha said: “Loadsa zombies.”

“Fifty two coffins,” Pira said. “The largest I’ve ever seen, before or since. And I’ve been resurrected so many times, I … ” She trailed off briefly. “I’d been around a few times by then, maybe half a dozen, maybe a few more, I don’t recall. But I’d never seen a tomb disgorge so many revenants at once. Most of them were fresh, first-timers, helpless. A small handful were very experienced. The resurrection chamber alone was a bloodbath.”

Elpida asked: “They turned on each other as they were coming out of the resurrection coffins?”

Pira nodded. “It’s not uncommon.” She indicated Ilyusha with one hand, barely raising a knuckle. “Thought she was going to do that, when we woke together.”

“Hey!” Ilyusha snapped. “Fuck you!”

Pira blinked — was that meant to indicate a shrug? “You look the part. That’s all. No offence meant.”

“Tch!” Ilyusha hissed through her teeth and folded her arms. She tapped the metal floor with the tip of her bionic tail.

Elpida did not intervene. Ilyusha and Pira had been working out their differences without her, before she’d joined them in the control cockpit. She hoped they would still be able to do so. The group would be stronger if she did not try to act as an intermediary for every disagreement.

“Pira,” she said. “Please continue.”

Pira did: “Fifty two fresh revenants. Five died in the coffins, unfinished, stillborn. About thirty of us made it out of the resurrection chamber. Ten of us reached the exit. And six of us made it out.”

Elpida said, “Those kinds of casualty rates, is that normal?”

Pira nodded slowly, staring at the floor.

Elpida chewed on that information. Her own exit and escape from the tomb, with all her comrades alive — minus herself, at the final hurdle, ironically enough — really was not normal here. Then again, there were twelve coffins in that resurrection chamber; two of her womb-mates had died inside their own metal boxes, their bodies incomplete, their resurrections halted; three fellow revenants had left the chamber before Elpida and the others had emerged. They had discovered one of those early risers, murdered and devoured by a predator. That left two unaccounted for.

Elpida knew she would probably never meet those women, whoever they were, if they were even still alive.

“Six of us,” Pira was saying. “There was me and two other normal revenants, Dubaku and Zhaleh. Du was experienced, heavily modified. She was like a ball of living knives, almost not human anymore. Zhal was fresh, a first-timer, but she took to undeath like a fish to water. Something was wrong with her. She didn’t react when she climbed out of the coffin, like she’d been taking a nap and overslept, totally calm. When the rest of us explained to her what was happening, she tore off a hydraulic piston from a coffin lid, and used it to murder two of the other revenants, right there in the resurrection chamber.”

Ilyusha hissed: “Fuuuuuck.”

“She swore on her god that the zombies she’d murdered had been planning to kill and eat the rest of us, that they had been playing along. By that point a score was dead already, we’d had to wrestle a couple of zombies down and strangle them with our bare hands, to stop them from carrying on with the killing and feasting. Nobody was inclined to argue.” She swallowed, rough and dry, then blinked hard, screwing her eyes shut for a long moment. “I’m getting bogged down. This doesn’t matter. Du and Zhal don’t matter. Why am I telling you this part?”

Elpida said, “Because this is an interrogation. Meander as much as you need.”

Pira slowly relaxed her eyes again. “What mattered was the other three of the initial six. The seed of The Fortress. The Trio.”

“The Trio?”

Pira said, “That’s what everyone called them, once the group began to grow, once we started collecting revenants with nowhere else to go. The Trio didn’t have names, just numbers. Eleven, Sixty Three, One-Oh-Nine.”

Elpida asked: “Artificial humans?”

Pira shook her head. “No. Flesh and blood. Or nanomachines. You know what I mean. They were fresh, first-timers. But they were identical to each other in every detail, short and stocky, skin the colour of boiled cabbage, blotched with purple spirals. Not tattoos, the skin itself. Claws instead of fingernails. Hair like wire wool. They were resurrected side-by-side, in adjacent coffins. They claimed to have died together.”

“Has that ever—”

Pira shook her head before Elpida could finish. “Never. Never heard of it, before or since. Whatever they were, they were linked somehow. They all spoke parts of each other’s sentences. Seemed to always know what the others were seeing or hearing. Couldn’t tell them apart unless you asked. They were more intelligent, like three minds working together, greater than the sum of their parts.”

Elpida frowned in thought. “A collective mind, resurrected together because they constituted a single person?”

Pira shrugged, then winced; the gesture had tugged at half a dozen stitched wounds and closed-up bullet holes across her torso. “They never told. Didn’t feel the need. Elpida—”

“Commander,” Elpida corrected. “For you, Pira, for now, for the duration of this, it’s ‘Commander’.”

Pira looked up and made eye contact. “Commander. When I saw you in the tomb, the way you took charge, I thought you were something like the Trio.” She stared for a long moment, a dead, flat gaze. “I think I was correct.”

Elpida smiled. “I’m not an isolated drone from a hive mind. My sisters in the cadre were not like that. We were individuals. We were only in each other’s head when we were wired up via the MMI uplinks.”

Snerk, snorted a groggy Howl in the back of Elpida’s head. What do you call this, then, Elps?

You don’t count, Howl.

Fuck you too, Commander.

Pira shook her head. “Not what I mean. I mean the other thing.”

“The other thing?”

Pira gestured weakly with her biological hand. “The Trio organised us. Kept us together. Gave us something to believe in. They could do it because they were so intelligent, and there were three of them. It just made sense, when we started picking up others.”

Elpida nodded. “They formed the natural nucleus of a cohesive group. That’s how you see me?”

Howl snorted again, fully awake inside Elpida’s mind: She’s your girl now, Elps. Of course she does. She fuckin’ believes in what you’re putting down, whatever shit comes out of her mouth-hole.

I’m not sure she does believe. Let me listen, Howl.

Pira did not answer the question. She said: “They had the idea for The Fortress. For trying to settle, put down roots, stop all the madness and the dying. Refuse the cycle, by building something. Anything. A place, a foundation. Stability. Safety.” Pira grew quiet as she spoke, eyes drifting away to the shadows again. “And from there, from a foundation, we might strike out at … ”

“The Necromancers?” Elpida suggested.

Pira sighed. “At whoever built all this. Whatever keeps it all running. The worms? The towers deep in the city? I believed in all that. I believed in it so strongly. I fought for it, because it was right and good. Because it was the only choice.”

She went quiet for a long time, sagging in her seat. A sheen of tears shone in her eyes. Ilyusha made an uncomfortable grumble.

Telokopolis is eternal, Howl growled inside Elpida’s mind. For this idiot bitch too.

“Telokopolis is eternal,” Elpida echoed.

Pira looked up, wiping her eyes. Ilyusha snorted, but then nodded along.

“That’s what you and the Trio were trying to do,” Elpida explained. “Trying to build a fragment of Telokopolis, where none are rejected, and all are sheltered. I would have believed in it too. In a way, I do. You’re right, Pira. You were doing the right thing.”

Pira looked away and carried on. “In the early days — years, really — we tried to secure fortified structures, old bunkers, defensible buildings, that sort of thing. But with numbers comes complication. The more zombies in one place, the more the temptation for bigger predators to approach and try their luck. The more resources needed just to keep the hunger at bay for everyone. The more organisation, the more formal hierarchy, the more control you need just to keep things stable.”

Elpida said, “I can see that. Cohesion becomes more complex with more people.”

“We did it, though. The Trio made it possible. And they delegated responsibility, gave people official roles and specialisations in their own vernacular. I was ‘Mil-Com’ for a while, in charge of combat operations. Civ-Com, Scav-Com, Dis-Com, that’s the language they used. Even when the roles weren’t very useful, they made everyone a place, gave everyone something to do.”

Elpida nodded, even though this wasn’t particularly revelatory. “Pira, there is an obvious question here.”

Pira sighed. “Yes. No matter how cohesive your group, the graveworms always move on. Revenants either move with them or die. The predators and zombies beyond the graveworm line are simply too much for us.”

“Enforced nomadism. No time or space to build.”

Pira said, “That went on for years. Sometime during that period is when I met Ooni. We pulled her out of a tomb. Long story, but nothing special.”

Nothing special? Elpida kept the frown off her face. Ooni adored Pira. Did Pira not think much of her in return? What a strange thing, to shoot your Commander in the stomach for a woman you did not hold in especially high regard.

Howl snorted. She just shows it funny. Like me!

“Pira,” Elpida said. “I got the impression that you and Ooni were romantic partners, or at least very close to it. Did you love her?”

Pira did not bother to look up. “Mm. You’re going to ask why. Because we had background in common. Because she’s more than she appears, when she’s pushed. Because she was … clean.”

Clean? Elpida kept her expression carefully neutral. What did that mean?

Pira went on: “Eventually we coalesced around a plan. A way to remain in one place when the graveworm moved on, and keep even the worst predators at bay, beyond the walls.”

“Occupy a tomb,” Elpida said.

Pira made a huffing sound through her nose; that was meant to be a laugh. “Ooni told you that part?”

“Yes. She seemed very proud of that, of The Fortress, of what you and your comrades achieved.”

Pira stared into the shadows. “We achieved nothing.”

Wrong fuckin’ thing, Elps, Howl snorted. She’s got negative pride. Pride in how much of a rotten fuck she is.

Elpida tried to redirect Pira’s self-loathing. “How exactly did you occupy a tomb, Pira? I can see how it would make a good defensible structure, but it would need a lot of work to actually maintain positions guarding the entrance, or setting it up for habitation.”

Pira blinked several times, rousing herself. She looked at Elpida. She even tried to sit up a little straighter. Aha, Elpida thought, that was the correct question.

“It did take a lot of work, that’s correct,” Pira said. “There were over a hundred and fifty of us by that point, and we’d been cohesive for over fifteen years. We weren’t just a band of scavengers anymore, we were a tribe, or an army. We had mechanical knowledge, heavy weaponry, experts in all sorts of fields. We had dedicated teams for scouting, protection, scavenging, even food distribution. That group of Death’s Heads who kept us captive back there, Commander? The Fortress would have chewed them up and spat them out.” She almost smiled. “We were the top of the food chain.”

Fuck yeah, Howl snorted. She’s a bitch, but she gets shit done.

Elpida smiled too.

“We went for a tomb right after the usual feeding frenzy, after it was open and cleared. Prepped for that for a long time. Spent years figuring out how to do it. We had more than enough people to hold the entrance, the killing ground, around the clock. We got into the gravekeeper’s chamber and went into the walls, where all the control machinery is for the tomb itself. Ignored the AI, they never give a fuck. We got into the wiring, the controls, got all the external weapon emplacements working and repaired, under our direction. We revived all sorts of facilities — medical, power generation, security feeds, computing. You name it, we got it running.” Pira’s voice started to break. “A Fortress. The Fortress. The thing we’d worked towards, for so long.”

Elpida nodded, struck by the conviction in Pira’s voice. Ilyusha was grinning.

Elpida said: “Ooni also told me you defeated a worm-guard.”

Pira smiled at last: harsh and bitter, a bare narrowing of her pale lips. “We didn’t defeat a worm-guard. It was fed to us.”

Ilyusha squinted. “Ehhh?”

Elpida held up one hand to stall Ilyusha. “Pira? What do you mean?”

“We had occupied the tomb for about three months. Then the graveworm began to move on. The moment of truth. We all braced to see if we would be able to hold out against whatever predators would come rushing in, or if we would be shattered and have to flee toward the graveworm’s tail.” Pira’s smile widened, sour and angry. “Instead we got a worm-guard.”

“The graveworm sent it after you? Because you were staying behind?”

Pira shook her head. “That’s what we thought at the time. Even the Trio thought that. Maybe we’d broken some kind of rule or condition that nobody had broken before. But I came to believe that wasn’t true.”

“What happened?”

Pira tried to straighten up, pulling against the dozens of tiny wounds and lines of stitches. She winced but did not relent. Elpida noticed fresh blood seeping into the soiled dressings on the left side of her jaw and throat.

“Pira—”

“The worm-guard came in the front of the tomb, into the killing ground,” Pira spat. “Twenty four of us were on duty. I was out there when it came over the walls. It killed fifteen revenants in the first ten seconds, shrugged off all the automatic guns, ran over us like we were nothing. I thought we were done. The Fortress was done. I was crammed beneath a shattered wall when it stepped over me.” Pira was panting now. “When I looked up I couldn’t even see it, just that mass of visual interference. It’s even worse up close, gets inside your head, scrambles your thoughts, fills your senses with this high-pitched whine like acid on your bones. Those things are weapons designed to keep us in our place. That is the only thing they’re for.” Pira reached up with her dented bionic arm and grasped the memory, fingers gripping a trigger in her mind. “I had an explosive lance. Close range armour penetrating high explosive, meant for punching through powered armour, or whatever madness grows beyond the graveworm line. Had to be close to use it, CQC range.” Pira shook her head, eyes wide and hollow, a dead sky inside her head. “Wouldn’t even scratch a worm-guard belly’s. I knew that. I waited to die.”

Pira froze, staring at nothing.

“But you didn’t,” said Elpida.

Pira shook her head. “I didn’t know why I moved. Still feel like I don’t. Like something else took hold of my arm and hand, like I was a puppet. Raised the lance, touched the tip to the worm-guard’s belly. I couldn’t even see, couldn’t think. And then, boom.”

“It died?”

“It died. Toppled sideways. So I would live to tell how I’d felled it. Should have crushed me.”

Elpida frowned. “And you think—”

“I think that was impossible. I think that worm-guard put up a token fight so we didn’t get suspicious. I think it was sent to us, like shit shovelled onto mushrooms in the dark. I think it was meant to feed us, to keep us going once the graveworm moved on.”

Elpida said, “Who sent it?”

“I don’t know,” Pira’s voice turned dark and hard. “The individual graveworm? I doubt that very much. The Necromancers? Maybe. Something else, behind the Necromancers? I have no idea. Whatever sent it to us, I think they wanted to feed us for a while, to see what we might become. And I assume we disappointed.”

“Why?”

“Because we failed.” Pira’s eyes filled with angry tears once again. “You want to know what we tried to build, Elpida?”

“Commander—”

“We tried to build a home. But that word doesn’t mean anything anymore. No rest for the wicked. No place to lay one’s head. No home. No city. No tribe. No grassy vale. No fucking grass. No stone will stand upon another. And no ‘Telokopolis’ either. Sometimes I think we are in the afterlife. Sometimes I think we’re in hell.”

Elpida said nothing. She let Pira’s anger burn itself out.

Dirty grey raindrops slid down Pheiri’s tiny window. Screens blinked and flickered in the gloom of the control cockpit. Ilyusha was chewing her tongue, grimacing at Pira’s story. Pira took a deep breath and wiped her eyes on a corner of her armoured coat. She shivered and shook, shrinking back into her seat.

“Commander,” she said.

“Thank you, Pira,” said Elpida. “I apologise for pushing you to recall all this. It is necessary.”

“You have that right.”

Ilyusha said: “What’s worm-guard taste like?”

Pira shook her head. She almost smiled again, but it was bitter and closed. “Not much. Couldn’t eat most of the thing. Many parts retained the visual and cognitive interference qualities, even when it was ‘dead’. We sifted through the ruins days later. Raw nanomachine slime, different consistencies and purposes, inside a multi-layered shell of exotic alloys and containment membranes. Plenty to eat, but tasteless and raw.”

Ilyusha grunted. “Weird.”

Elpida asked: “Why did The Fortress fail, even with all those extra resources?”

Pira’s brief burst of anger-borne energy had faded; she sat hunched and listing in her seat, lit from one side by the sickly green glow of Pheiri’s monitors.

“Logistics.”

“Ah,” Elpida said.

Pira snorted again, a single breath expelled through her nose. “We lasted six years out there. We had plenty of food at first — plenty of nanomachines. But even worm-guard guts run dry eventually. We scoured the inside of the tomb for scraps, thought we might be able to get some kind of nanomachine production running, but there isn’t any. Only the worms can actually produce it, nothing else. When the scraps were expended, we started to send hunting parties out beyond the tomb, to catch and kill whatever they could.” Pira shook her head slowly. “The ecosystem beyond the worms is almost beyond human imagination, Commander. There are things out there I cannot explain. Most of them, the largest, the strangest, we were simply below their notice. The tomb defences and our weapons drove off any curious predators. But venturing out to hunt attracted attention. That made it clear there was vulnerable meat inside the tomb. Things got bad. Things got inside now and again, hunted us, carried us off, ate us. Some tried to communicate. For some, eating was communication.” She took a shuddering breath. “We were at the bottom of the food chain, out there. And eventually there was nothing to eat but each other.”

“Shit,” Ilyusha spat. “Shit! Shit!”

Pira’s voice ground onward. “When zombies get that run down, we don’t just eat each other, we start to recycle parts, like a snake devouring its own tail. The ones of us who were left … ” Pira trailed off and swallowed. “Jalice, she lost her mind and started stealing limbs from the dead. We found her down in the gravekeeper’s chamber one day, a ball of flesh, no brain. Perisa, she cut herself apart, pulled out her own guts. Tandrice and Yeerp, they … they … joined each other’s bodies … ”

Elpida said, “I’m sorry, Pira.”

“There is a level to which one can descend which cannot be believed until one has seen it.” Pira shrank back into her coat again, small and wounded. “Our numbers dwindled. The Trio died in strange circumstances; I’m certain it was foul play, something from outside the tomb, something which knew they were there. Maybe something terminating the experiment. I got badly wounded, more than once. Eventually there were only fifteen of us, starving to death, eating pieces of our friends’ corpses, watching each other for signs of madness. And then the inevitable happened.”

“The inevitable?”

Pira took a deep breath. She slumped further, an undermined wall. “A graveworm turned up to restock the tomb, to resurrect another batch of revenants.”

“Ahhhhh,” said Ilyusha. “Shiiiiit.”

“Mmhmm,” Pira grunted. “The Trio had planned for that, or claimed they did. They’d spent five years rewiring and reprogramming the inside of the tomb, to assume control of any systems which opened communications.”

Elpida said: “They were going to take control of the worm-guard?”

Pira blinked, another stand-in for a shrug. “Maybe. Maybe the whole worm. But the plan died with them. When a graveworm approaches a tomb the first thing it does is blanket the area with hundreds of worm-guard. I suspect we in The Fortress were the first revenants to discover that fact.”

“Hundreds?” Elpida echoed.

Pira nodded. “To clear out anything which shouldn’t be there. And those worm-guard did not fall to an explosive lance, or anything else.” She took a great breath and leaned back in her seat, wincing and squinting at the pain of her many wounds. “Only three of us made it out, because we ran. Myself, Ooni, and another revenant called Riianet.”

“Pira, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“Why?”

Pira opened her eyes and stared right at Elpida, blank and unapologetic, without regret or shame. “Because that’s when I joined the Death’s Heads.”

Ilyusha snorted with disgust, though less strongly than Elpida had expected.

Elpida said: “Illy? Did you two discuss this already?”

“Yeeeeeeah,” Ilyusha rasped. “Fucking idiot.”

Pira said: “I do not dispute that. I am a fool and a traitor.”

Elpida gestured for her to continue. “Please, Pira. Tell me about the Death’s Heads.”

Pira raised one shoulder in a tiny shrug. “We ran right into them, right at the tip of the graveworm safe zone. They were playing a dangerous game of their own, risking proximity to the front of the wave as the worm moved. I’d never even heard of them before, never met a Death’s Head, though I’d seen some revenants wearing their skull symbol. But not up close. They were very interested in where we’d come from, in what had happened at The Fortress.” Pira shook her head. “Even then I had a suspicion that somehow they’d known. Something had told them. They were working for something else.”

Just like Yola, Elpida thought. She didn’t say that out loud, not yet. “A Necromancer?”

“I don’t know. Never figured that out.”

“And why did you join them?”

“Because I’d just spent two decades learning that nothing can be built. We are meat, food for the gods. Playthings for Necromancers. Corpse puppets pretending to be people. Because I was wrong. Hope is a lie.” 

Ilyusha rasped: “It’s not! Not!”

Elpida said, “Illy, it’s okay. Let her speak her mind. Pira?”

Pira’s blank, dead face creased with old sorrow. “Riianet was weak and wounded. They had me shoot her as a test of loyalty. They didn’t want Ooni, but Ooni was under my protection, sort of. We didn’t last long. Less than a year.”

“Ooni didn’t join them?”

Pira shook her head. “No. I didn’t let her.”

Ha! Howl barked inside Elpida’s head. Kept her girlfriend pure, huh?

“Pira,” Elpida said. “You called Ooni a traitor, for joining the Death’s Heads. Presumably that didn’t happen while you two were still together?”

Pira said: “A traitor to the memory of The Fortress.”

Elpida said, “When you said The Fortress was betrayed, is that what you meant?”

Pira stared, hollow and blank, her eyes the blue of skies burned sterile. “The Fortress was betrayed by me. I joined the Death’s Heads. I was the only one who gave up, instead of dying.

“Until Ooni.”

Pira just blinked.

Elpida said, “And then you turned against them?”

Pira shook her head. “Ooni and I both died. Separately. When I was next resurrected I went looking for the Death’s Heads again, for another splinter of their ideology, for whatever group wore the skull.”

Elpida raised her eyebrows. “You went back to them?”

Ilyusha hissed. “Fuckin’ stupid shit.”

“I’m not proud of it,” Pira said. “But I learned. They taught me things. About meat. About graveworms and towers. All of it.”

Elpida pressed; she needed an answer. “And when did you turn against them?”

Pira almost smiled, bitter with self-hate. “I don’t have a good story for you, Elpida—”

“Commander.”

“Commander,” Pira corrected. “I don’t have an incident to relate which opened my eyes. We didn’t pick apart a happy little group and eat their bone marrow, so I could have my moment of conscience. There was nothing like that. No redemptive revelation. I just came to realise they were full of shit. They were wrong. They could not build, anymore than The Fortress could. They weren’t even trying. They were just excusing their predatory hunger.”

Elpida nodded. “Yeah. I got that, too.”

“I will never again eat human flesh,” said Pira. “That is non-negotiable.”

Elpida glanced at Ilyusha. Illy dipped her head with an awkward grimace, nodding as she grumbled. “She’s not lying’. Just a fucking dumb fuck bitch.”

Pira said, “I am a fool and a traitor. That’s all I am.”

Elpida took a deep breath of her own and glanced around the control cockpit, at Pheiri’s gunmetal grey innards, speckled with scraps of cream-white paint, encrusted with a dozen layers of retrofitted control panels and monitors and readouts. She raised her eyes to the tiny steel-glass view-port, to the dirty rain and the undead sunrise, barely more than an ember’s glow in a far corner of the black sky. She listened to the thrum and thump of Pheiri’s nuclear heartbeat below her feet, and the hundreds of tiny machine sounds deep inside his body.

Pheiri’s not Telokopolis, Howl chuckled. But he’s done good on his own so far. Tell our little brother good job from sister Howl, huh?

Will do, Howl. But not right now.

“It is possible to build and survive beyond the graveworm line,” Elpida said. She gestured upward. “We are sitting inside living proof. Telokopolis is forever. A piece of it still stands, right here.”

Pira blinked slowly, casting her eyes around the cockpit. She said: “It will fall, like anything else.”

A small black screen at Pira’s side flickered to life, glowing with a sudden flash of green text. Pira turned in surprise, slowed by her various wounds. She blinked at the words on the screen. Elpida leaned forward so she could see what Pheiri had to say.

>
online: 99999999 ERROR hours
>

Pira frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t be rude to Pheiri,” Elpida said.

“What?”

“He’s survived out here much longer than any of us. Longer than your Fortress. Longer than anything, as far as I can tell. He protected his remaining crew, stayed alive, and he’s still going. And now he’s protecting us, too. He is a tiny shard of Telokopolis, come to shelter us and be sheltered in return. And now he’s my Co-Commander. Say thank you.”

Pira frowned at Elpida. But Ilyusha cackled and tapped the tip of her tail against the decking. “Thank you, Pheiri!”

Pira looked unconvinced. Clinging to her defeat.

“I’m serious,” Elpida said. “You’ve found the same principle as The Fortress, alive and well. Telokopolis is forever. You have a place here too, Pira.”

Pira shook her head. “I don’t. No, I don’t.”

Elpida straightened her back and touched the bandages over her stomach. “Pira. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by asking why you shot me in the gut. I understand why you did that. If our positions had been reversed, if one of my cadre had joined the Death’s Heads, I would have done the same to protect her, no matter the symbol she wore. But—”

Pira interrupted. “This is nonsense, Elpida.”

“Commander.”

Pira did not correct herself. Her eyes seemed to clear, burning blue in her pale face. “If I was in your position, I would have me shot.”

Elpida said, “You demonstrated that you’re on our side, when you protected Pheiri. You—”

“I did no such thing,” Pira said.

The screen at Pira’s side went blank, then filled with a block of scrolling data, of weapon readouts and timestamps. Elpida could not read the information from where she sat, but she could imagine what it meant: proof that Pira’s stunt with the coilgun had turned away a powerful anti-armour weapon. Pheiri was saying thank you.

Pira ignored the screen. She said: “I protected the tank, but that proves nothing. Perhaps I did it out of guilt. Or to help Ooni survive, or to repay my debt to you. It does not prove I believe in your cause, or that I’m safe to have inside your group, or that I am telling the truth about a single thing I’ve said. It proves nothing. I cannot be trusted.”

“Pira,” Elpida said, “I don’t trust—”

“Why am I still alive, Elpida?”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.“

Even zombies can build, even with nothing but ash and bone. But not with worms to devour the roots of their work. Pira thinks she’s seen the place where every effort leads, where every good intention ends, but Elpida won’t let this go. Even in the face of this. Even after being told that there’s no hope. And after all, is Pira even telling the whole truth, or just the tiny sliver of it she had access to?

Last chapter of the arc next week! After that, we’re finally onto arc 9, and perhaps a change of pace, change of tone, and even a new POV or two (maybe!)

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And thank you for reading! Thank you for reading my little story, of messed up zombie girls at the end of all things. We’ve got miles and miles to go yet, and so has Elpida.

Content Warnings

Physical paralysis/loss of control
Sleep paralysis
Gaslighting (kinda? maybe?)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida dreamed of playing chess.

She and Howl were seated at a familiar table, in the rec room of the cadre’s private quarters, deep inside the Legion District on spire-floor 186, in the heart of Telokopolis.

Dreamlike phantoms haunted Elpida’s peripheral vision — memories of her other sisters, pausing to watch the game in progress, or heading for the sofas and the screens on the far side of the rec room, or passing by on their way to other pleasurable diversions. Elpida was vaguely aware of Metris and Yeva sliding from a sofa to the floor together; Metris was straddling Yeva in a way that told Elpida the rec room may soon grow noisy with ribald suggestions and cheers and laughter, or that some sisters might soon move to the dorms to continue the activity in question. Elpida ached to join them, to surrender to the logic of the dream, to lose herself in her sisters.

But that was only a memory. She focused on the game. She did not look up.

The chess set was made of wood. The pieces had been carved by hand and lacquered in black and white to indicate the opposing sides. The set had been presented to the cadre as a gift, by General Inglas Orion of the Legion’s XII Division, one year to the day after Elpida had helped save the General and his men from their failed expedition into the green. The chess set would fetch an obscene value on the open market; the Civitas and the Grower’s Guild placed strict limits on the extraction of raw wood from the buried fields below the city. The chess pieces and the board were probably made from pruned branches. Even a decorated war hero General did not have the kind of political pull to claim part of a felled tree for personal use.

But the chess set was a symbol; General Inglas’ real gift had been his voice in the Civitas.

A small voice. Not enough.

Elpida pushed those thoughts away. Regrets would not serve her well in a dream. She and Howl could have chosen to play with holographic extrusions from the table itself. They could have chosen a thousand other games in which to compete. But Elpida had insisted on chess. Dream logic had done the rest.

Elpida finally made her move: she advanced her single remaining raven, leapfrogged three walls, captured an isolated lighthouse, and pinned Howl’s empress with a pincer movement that she’d been setting up for the last ten turns.

“There,” Elpida said. “Escape that.”

Howl snorted. She unfolded herself from her habitual squat in her chair, letting go of her own naked ankles and reaching out for the board. She did not stop to think. In a single move Howl advanced a snail, took Elpida’s raven, and put Elpida’s city in check.

“Done!” Howl cackled. She folded herself back into her comfortable squat-crouch. “Escape that? You’re stuck, Elps. Give up. Surrender. Submit. Do it now, before you take another turn, and I’ll go easy with the punishment. I’ll only sit on your face for fifteen minutes this time.”

Elpida sighed with relief, leaned back in her chair, and looked up from the board.

Howl’s purple eyes sparkled with cruel humour. Her albino-white hair was raked back over her skull, sticking up in all directions. But then her brow furrowed with confusion.

“Elps?” she said. “What are you so happy about? You’re losing, Co-maaan-durrr.”

Elpida smiled wide. “I was always terrible at this game.”

“Yeah, exactly! Remember when I beat you in twelve straight matches? Remember the night afterward?” Howl stuck her tongue all the way out and touched the tip to the bottom of her chin.

“Mm. It was mostly you, Metris, and Scoria who were any good at chess. Arry and Quio were close, but a little slower. Kos was incredible, but only if she wanted to be. I never learned to play.” Elpida shook her head. “And I still can’t.”

Howl narrowed her eyes. “Elps, where are you going with this?”

Elpida said: “You can’t be a figment of my imagination, or a partitioned piece of my own mind, either brought on by stress or grown by nanomachine self-modification of my neural structure. You know how to play chess. I’ve been paying attention this whole time, concentrating, not letting myself dream. You’re following the rules. You’re beating me. You know this game. I don’t.”

Howl grinned. “Still don’t trust that I’m me?”

“I trust that you’re real. But are you the real Howl, or something else imitating her?” Elpida sighed. “I’m not sure that matters.”

Howl cackled. “And now I’m gonna beat you and sit on your face. Wanna taste test me, too? Maybe that’ll convince—”

Fzzt.

The dream flickered, like a glitchy monitor slapped with an open palm.

Howl grimaced. “The fuck was—”

* * *

Elpida woke up.

She was lying flat on her back, in the bunk room, inside Pheiri.

She had managed to wedge herself onto one of the middle bunks, with her head in one corner and her feet in the other, knees bent to compensate for her height. She stared at the underside of the next bunk up, blank cream-white paint on cold metal. The room was very quiet, silence backed by the slow heartbeat throb of Pheiri’s reactor far below. The thunderstorm had passed. A muffled drip-drip-drip of water kept time in the gloom. Perhaps that was run-off from Pheiri’s exterior hull.

Elpida felt a moment of heart-wrenching loss for the dream of her sisters. She wanted to sob, but she was too groggy. Her vision was blurry. Her body felt heavy. Her limbs were filled with lead. The molten agony of her gut wound had burned down to a thin smoulder. She let her eyelids drift shut. Perhaps if she went back to sleep she might dream of her sisters again, safe in the heart of Telokopolis.

But then a face invaded her field of vision.

Copper-brown skin, shiny and clean. Electric purple eyes, wide and manic. Albino-white hair, long and loose, tucked over a shoulder. Leaning over the bunk. Peering down at Elpida. Noses almost close enough to touch. A nightmare mirror on the precipice of sleep.

Elpida’s own face.

Necromancer! Elpida tried to scream — but her throat was paralysed. Her tongue and lips refused to move. She tried to jackknife her body to head-butt the mirror’s nose and slam a fist outward to bury her knuckles in the imposter’s gut. But nothing happened. Her muscles were frozen. Her body was locked up. A weight pressed upon Elpida’s chest, crushing and suffocating.

The Necromancer had taken control, just like up on the combat frame’s hull.

The mocking mirror of Elpida’s face split with a grin from ear to ear, peeling back both lips and flesh. Steel teeth, razor sharp and needle-pointed, tips coated with blood and gore. The Necromancer’s imitation mouth was all torn up inside, lacerated by her own teeth, running freely with crimson and scarlet.

“Still try—ing, dead thing?” the Necromancer hissed in a parody of Elpida’s voice, scratchy like static. “Don’t, know how you diiiiid it, but here, you are. And where did I — go, hmmm? How did you? Do that?”

Elpida tried to shout a warning to the others. Her throat would not move.

Howl! she yelled into her own mind. Howl, wake up! Howl, get out here!

“Ah—ah-ahhhh,” the Necromancer whispered. “Don’t be so, angry — now. You’ll last longer if you. Don’t try. So hard. A piece of advice, dead thing: keep your head, down. Go, off unnoticed. Don’t be — seen.”

The Necromancer closed her gore-smeared mouth and slid back out of Elpida’s field of vision. Elpida could not even move her eyeballs to follow the motion.

The weight stayed on her chest for a long time, pressing down on her ribcage. She felt her bones creak.

Silence. Drip-drip-drip. Distant breathing. Pheiri’s engines, throbbing and humming.

All of a sudden the pressure vanished. Elpida’s muscles were her own to command. She gasped and jerked sideways on the mattress, lashing out with a fist, ready to fight—

No Necromancer.

Nothing but the bunk room. Gunmetal grey with flakes of cream paint, scratchy blue blankets over thin mattresses, the scent of sweat and old books and firearm lubricant.

Elpida lay still for several seconds, panting through her nose, eyes wide, heart racing. Adrenaline surged through her bloodstream. Sweat beaded on her skin. The bunk room was silent except for the distant drip of water and the soft susurration of sleep.

Elpida climbed out of her bunk, slowly and carefully. She peeled back the lumpy blanket. She swung her legs out first, found the floor with her feet, then slipped out and stood up; her gut wound complained at the contortions, stitches pulling at her skin, a hot line of fire running across her belly and deep into her intestines. But the raw blue nanomachines had done their job — the pain was very bad, but bearable.

Her internal body clock had regained coherency; she had slept for perhaps twelve to fifteen hours, long enough that the others had likely all gone to bed as well. Was it night outdoors, or was it the sad memory which passed for daylight in the black and soot-choked sky? Her muscles were stiff as old wire and needed a stretch. Her eyelids rasped like sandpaper. Her head was thick as cold tar. Her throat was dry and dusty, she needed water. But her mind was moving fast.

The bunk room hatch was closed. The equipment and books on the lower bunks had not been disturbed. Nothing looked out of place.

Elpida was not the only zombie making use of the bunk room: Amina was curled up in the same top bunk she had occupied before, snug and small beneath her coat and blankets; Ooni was lying on one of the lowest bunks, with her back pressed tight against the wall; Atyle was also present, on a middle bunk, flat on her back, stripped down to tomb-grey underlayers, her hands crossed over her chest.

All three were fast asleep — or at least pretending. Any one of them could be a Necromancer in disguise.

Howl? Elpida hissed inside her own mind. Howl, wake up, right now.

Howl replied in a groggy gurgle: Mmmm-what? Elps, what? Immasleepin.

Did you see the Necromancer? Just now, did you see that? You see what I see, don’t you?

Howl sighed, wet and grumpy. You had a fuckin’ dream. Go back to sleep, Elps. You need it. Go back to sleep so I can sit on your face. Bitch arse, you’re so … mmm … 

Howl rolled over and went back to sleep.

Elpida stayed very still, hunched below the bunk room ceiling. She considered the possible scenarios, from least-bad to worst-case.

One: sleep paralysis and/or hallucination. Two: external broadcast from beyond Pheiri, into Elpida’s neural lace, taking advantage of the liminal state between sleep and consciousness. Three: Necromancer intrusion, Pheiri unaware. Four: Necromancer intrusion, Pheiri aware, crew not alerted to minimise danger. Five: Necromancer intrusion, Pheiri compromised.

She discarded scenarios one and two as wishful thinking — not impossible, but unworthy of response. Scenario five would render any actions pointless; she may as well go back to bed. Scenarios three and four both demanded the same action: head to the control cockpit and ask Pheiri.

Elpida got dressed, quickly and quietly. She took a fresh tomb-grey t-shirt from the supplies piled on the lowest bunks. Her gut wound complained as she lifted her arms to pull the t-shirt over her head, but she gritted her teeth and stayed silent. Somebody had moved her armoured coat from the infirmary and left it with the rest of the equipment. She dragged the coat on over her shoulders. A single layer of bulletproof fabric would probably not stop a Necromancer from killing her — but it might make all the difference in a sadistic game of cat and mouse. If the Necromancer wanted to kill Elpida, it could have achieved that aim while she was paralysed. It had not done so.

No, Elpida decided — if there really was a Necromancer on board, this was not about killing.

Elpida retrieved her submachine gun, made sure it was loaded, the safety was on, and then looped the strap over her shoulder. She crept to the bunk room hatch, opened it slowly, peered out into the crew compartment with her weapon ready — and then whipped back around to the bunk room.

Neither Amina, nor Ooni, nor Atyle had moved an inch.

Elpida had not expected that trick to work, but she had to try it anyway. In a similar situation against any other foe she would have woken all her companions, made sure everybody was armed, and swept Pheiri room-by-room, with others to cover her back. But if the Necromancer could imitate Elpida then it could probably imitate any of the others.

Or maybe that was what it wanted Elpida to think?

Elpida stuck to the plan. She stepped out into the crew compartment and gently closed the bunk room hatch behind her.

Hafina and Melyn were asleep on the floor, in what Elpida gathered was their usual spot, snuggled down inside a nest of blankets wedged against one of the metal benches. Hafina was rumbling and purring in her sleep, a deep and resonant sound, a counterpoint to the distant heartbeat of Pheiri’s reactor. Melyn was cuddled up against Hafina’s front. The blankets and Hafina’s bulk swallowed up Melyn’s tiny, pixie-like physique, leaving only a pale grey-white face peeking out.

The airlock door stood at the rear of the crew compartment, shut and sealed, several inches thick. Beyond that lay the airlock chamber and the wide ramp for external access. Elpida guessed that the crew compartment had once been intended for deployment of ground troops — perhaps Hafina and her own long-lost comrades. The Necromancer could not have entered through there. Everyone would have noticed.

To Elpida’s left was the narrow, steep set of steps which led up to the top hatch, more a tilted ladder than proper stairs. The top hatch allowed access to Pheiri’s outer hull. Melyn had explained that it was possible to walk around up there, on Pheiri’s flat, armoured back, like an exterior deck. But that hatch also contained an airlock.

Elpida had not yet fully internalised Pheiri’s layout: she knew the crew compartment, the infirmary, and the bunk room here in the rear; that section was connected by a crooked, junk-filled corridor to the control cockpit up front. Storage racks lay above the crew compartment and the engineering deck slept below her feet — but the latter was inaccessible by anybody larger than Melyn. The rear and top hatches were the only external entry points.

That did not rule out physical intrusion by a Necromancer. Vicky and Kagami had described how the Necromancer they’d fought had reconstituted itself from liquid, from chunks of gore, from bloody goop splashed up the wall. Such a being might easily squeeze through even a hairline crack.

Elpida crossed the crew compartment and quietly opened the infirmary door; she eased herself through the gap, leading with the muzzle of her gun. Whatever she did next she needed to hydrate first.

The infirmary was empty. Ilyusha was not there. Pira was gone.

Elpida pressed a palm to the surgical bed on which Pira had been sleeping, in the middle of the long indent left by Pira’s body weight. The blood-stained plastic surface was no warmer than room temperature; Pira had been gone for a while.

Elpida crossed to the tiny steel sink and drank several mug’s worth of water, then wiped her face with a wet hand. She didn’t need the wake-up call. Her body was already in emergency mode, full of adrenaline and cortisol, ready for combat, but the ritual of splashing her face with water made her feel better, even if the water was lukewarm and tasted like metal.

She listened to the sounds of Pheiri’s body. A heartbeat in the depths. A drip-drip-drip from outside. Tiny machine noises. Clicking and whirring.

No Necromancer footsteps creeping up behind her. No cackle in the shadows. No slither of scales over steel floors.

Elpida left the infirmary and headed toward the control cockpit. She kept both hands on her submachine gun, muzzle pointed at the floor, finger by the trigger.

Pheiri’s spinal corridor was a jumble of auxiliary systems, loose cables, unoccupied seats, dark screens, and closed hatches. Elpida had not understood why this part of Pheiri was so disorganised, not until she had spoken to him and come to know his origins. This ‘corridor’ was formed by a dozen layers of retrofitted systems, additional weapon loadout controls, and desperate attempts to cram more combat power into the armoured vehicle. Some of the screens and dead readouts and symbols on keyboards looked almost Telokopolan to Elpida’s eyes — archaeological discoveries, reverse-engineered and pressed into urgent service against a foe Elpida did not yet comprehend. A new nanomachine plague; the result of Afon Ddu’s defeat was all around her, in the corpse-city outside. But what exactly had they fought? The Silico? The Necromancers? Zombies like herself? Or were all those categories just parts of the same ecosystem?

Elpida wanted to familiarise herself with every inch of Pheiri’s insides; this incident proved that need. If there was a Necromancer inside the tank, she needed to hunt it down. The creature could be hiding in some forgotten corner, nestled in a crack of metal, lurking behind any one of these access hatches and control panels. She and the others may not be able to confront the creature, but the idea of leaving the thing to creep around in the dark was out of the question. Perhaps Pheiri had some way of combating a Necromancer. Or maybe they could contact Serin, see if that anti-Necromancer weapon of hers really worked or not.

She passed by the ladder to Pheiri’s main turret and glanced upward into the gloom. The uplink helmet hung in the darkness. If the Necromancer had already reached that, then Pheiri would be compromised. But wouldn’t the Necromancer have gone for the uplink before waking Elpida? Then again, Pheiri was not a nanomachine zombie; perhaps he was immune to Necromancer control.

None of this made any sense.

As Elpida approached the final blind corner before the control cockpit she heard a croaky voice speaking from up ahead.

“—don’t know how to do that. Don’t know how to get better. Too much has been broken. Some things never heal.”

That was Pira.

“Mmmmmm,” a reply, a grunt — Ilyusha.

Elpida called out softly: “Illy, it’s me.”

“Elpi?” Ilyusha said.

Elpida emerged into the control cockpit and straightened up. She kept her submachine gun pointed downward.

Pira and Ilyusha were sitting on opposite sides of the rear area of the control cockpit, close to the entrance. Ilyusha was cross-legged in a chair, one arm thrown casually over the back. Her shotgun lay across her thighs. Her tail was coiled lazily on the floor, tip twitching. Her grey eyes smouldered in the gloom.

Pira looked like she should be in a medically induced coma, for her own safety. She was hunched in a chair, listing to one side like a damaged wall, her shoulders hunched beneath an armoured coat draped over her back, for dignity or warmth. Her near-naked body was a patchwork of dressings and bandages and stitches, plugged bullet-holes and sewn-up gashes and lacerations wrapped in gauze. The mass of stitches and gauze on the left side of her face was spotted with old, dried, clotted blood, turning black and crispy. Her exposed bionic arm lay in her lap. Her sky-blue eyes had gone flat and quiet, ringed with dark circles. She blinked slowly.

“Elpida,” she croaked. She had trouble talking with all those dressings on one side of her jaw and throat.

Ilyusha hopped to her feet, shotgun in her hands, tail whipping upward. “What’s wrong?” she barked. “Elpi? What’s wrong!?”

Elpida eyed the pair of them. This private meeting made sense, even if it was unexpected. There was nothing suspicious here. Elpida wished she could feel glad about this surprise.

“Illy,” she said. “Good job on following my orders. Good girl, well done. You stay right where you are. You too, Pira. I need to talk to Pheiri, quickly.”

Several dark screens flickered to life in the depths of the control cockpit. Elpida crossed to the nearest one. Green text awaited her.

>Commander

Elpida said: “Pheiri, is there an intruder on board?”

Ilyusha spat: “Fuck! What?!”

Elpida raised a hand. “Illy, hold for a moment.”

The green text refreshed itself on the dark screen.

>
///current crew compliment access query
///total expected internal: 8
. . . direct section assignment ‘Melyn’
. . . direct section assignment ‘Hafina’
. . . nanomachine conglomerations detected
. . . nanomachine conglomeration ‘Elpida’
. . . nanomachine conglomeration ‘Ilyusha’
. . . nanomachine conglomeration ‘Pira’
. . . nanomachine conglomeration ‘Amina’
. . . nanomachine conglomeration ‘Atyle’
. . . nanomachine conglomeration ‘Ooni’
///returns match expected parameters
///null response
>

Elpida wet her lips. “Are you certain? Please run whatever internal diagnostics you have.”

The text vanished and refreshed again.

>
///internal active system scans alpha — theta
///alpha return: null
///beta return: null
///gamma return: null
///delta return: null
///epsilon return: null
///zeta return: null
///eta return: null
///theta return: null
///null response
>

Elpida did not allow herself to relax yet. “Okay, Pheiri. Thank you. Here’s why I’m asking. I believe I saw a Necromancer in the bunk room. Is there any chance of—”

“Fuuuuck!” Illy screeched. She stamped one clawed foot and made her shotgun go click-crunch.

The green text refreshed before Elpida could finish the question.

>
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
>

“Nanomachine control locus,” Elpida read out loud. “That means a Necromancer, right. And you’re not detecting one nearby. Alright. One more question.” Elpida braced herself for the worst. Her hands felt slippery on her weapon. But what use would small arms be if Pheiri was compromised? “If a Necromancer attempted to sneak up on you, in order to infiltrate you, would you always know? Or could one get close enough to—”

The green text overwrote itself, too impatient to erase and refresh.

>
>patch no. 2.34.8 notes line 416 as follows

‘Nano-blob synapse feedback detection is now complete! You ain’t gettin’ past this iteration. I’ll stake a whole month’s chocolate ration on that. I challenge any of you bastards in mil-spec-six to defeat this one. Yes, you can even bring the blob in the cage and let it crawl all over the testing room, turn itself to gas, or a puddle of shit, or whatever it does when it thinks the cameras aren’t looking. None of you are getting through this. Emyr owes me for this one.’

>patch no. 2.34.8 notes line 416 END
>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE
>

Elpida blew out a long breath.

Of the scenarios she had laid out, the answer was either: one — hallucination and/or sleep paralysis; two — external broadcast; or five, and Pheiri had been compromised. But apparently Necromancer detection was a solved problem for the military forces of Afon Ddu.

Elpida decided to put her trust in the descendants of Telokopolis.

She placed her submachine gun down on the nearest flat console and flexed her hands. Her fingers had gone stiff. She took several deep breaths, then turned back to Ilyusha and Pira. Illy was staring with wide eyes and gritted teeth, clutching her shotgun tight. Pira just looked half-dead.

Elpida said; “Stand down, Illy. I think we’re in the clear.”

Ilyusha grimaced. She let her shotgun go limp, then tossed it into a chair. “Yeah? Yeah?!”

Elpida sat down heavily in the nearest seat. The impact sent a jolt of pain up through her gut wound. She winced and grunted and closed her eyes for a moment. She was being careless.

“Elpi?” Ilyusha prompted. “The fuck?”

Elpida explained: “I thought I saw the Necromancer again. The same one as up on the combat frame. Wearing my face. She — it — was leaning over my bed when I woke up. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. It said some words, then retreated again. A few moments later the paralysis passed, but the Necromancer was gone. It’s not inside Pheiri. If Pheiri’s sensors are accurate—”

A screen near Elpida’s elbow filled with green text: it was the same as before, Pheiri repeating that his Necromancer detection was perfect.

“—which I believe they are,” Elpida added, “then either I suffered some kind of sleep paralysis and a hallucination, or I received a broadcast via my neural lace.”

Illy bared her teeth and hissed with disgust. “Fuck. Fuckin’ shit. Messing with your head!”

Elpida nodded. “I think that’s likely, yes. A broadcast.”

Sleep paralysis was not entirely outside of the cadre’s experience; the genetic engineers of the pilot project had not been able to iron out every single wrinkle in the human body and nervous system. But it was uncommon for any of her sisters to experience problems with sleep. Even insomnia was rare.

And the cadence of the Necromancer’s speech was unlike anything Elpida had heard before.

Elpida looked to the front of the control cockpit. Pheiri had peeled back a tiny sliver of his exterior carbon bone-mesh armour plating, to expose the steel-glass rectangle of a view port. The window was set high up in the cockpit, with a seat for access. It was no larger than Elpida’s hand and the steel-glass must have been four feet thick, but she could see the corner of a distant building and the soot-choked sky beyond, lit by the first ruddy glow of dying red light from one edge of the blackened firmament. Dawn in the land of the dead.

It was still raining but too gently to hear; gritty black drizzle slithered down the steel-glass in a steady stream of thin droplets. That must be the source of the dripping sound: rain pooling in the divots and knots of Pheiri’s armour, trickling down his sides.

Elpida said, “Pheiri, can you please contact Vicky and Kagami, over in the combat frame? I need to ask them a question.”

Several readouts near the front of the cockpit flickered and jumped, filling with text and numbers. Silence descended as Elpida waited. Ilyusha huffed and growled through her teeth, then cast herself back down in her chair. Pira said nothing.

A speaker burst with soft static hum, then crackled with a familiar voice, sleepy and grumpy: “What— the fuck do you want, Commander?”

“Good morning, Kagami,” said Elpida.

Kagami growled down the comms connection. “‘Good’ ‘morning’, yes. I was sleeping, thank you. Being woken up by a direct line into my brain is not very fun. Are you coming to get us? Is this our call to up and out?”

Elpida smiled. “Not yet, but that’s next on our agenda. Kagami, are you and Vicky safe?”

“Nothing has changed, Commander,” Kagami drawled, dripping acid. “Vicky is asleep. I’m not waking her for you.”

“And how’s the pilot?”

“Stable.” Kagami huffed. “What is this, a social call? Are we team-building? Chatting about our days? If you have time to chat, come fucking get us!”

“Kagami, I have a very important question for you,” Elpida said. “You still have the corpse of the Necromancer, is that correct?”

Kagami went quiet. Elpida heard a rustle. After a long moment, Kagami just said: “Yes. We do. What of it?”

“And you can visually confirm that, right now?”

“Yes. It’s right fucking there! I can see it from here. Hard to sleep with that lump lying on the floor and nothing to even cover it with. There’s nowhere to dispose of the bastard thing inside this giant living mech. You’d think it would have a stomach where we can dump crap like this, but no, no, no, no stomach! No stomach. Tch.”

“And the Necromancer has not gotten up or moved around or anything like that?”

A long silence. Then: “Don’t you fucking say that, Elpida.”

“Kagami, please confirm—”

“Yes!” Kagami snapped. “Yes, it’s not bloody well fucking moved! Great. Thank you. There’s no way I’m going back to sleep now. Fuck you, Commander. Is that all? Don’t tell me you’re having an emergency over there. Have you shot the little fascist yet?”

Ilyusha answered: “No!”

Kagami huffed and spat.

Elpida said: “We’re all safe over here. Kagami, sit tight. Hold on, rest, and keep your hatches shut. Linking up with you and Vicky is first priority as soon as we’re capable. Today if we can. ASAP. I promise. You’re both part of my cadre and I am not abandoning you.”

Kagami grumbled something inaudible. Then: “Is that all, Commander? Can I go back to staring at this Necromancer corpse in peace now?”

Elpida grinned. Ilyusha grinned back. Elpida said: “Sure thing, Kaga. Say hi to Vicky. Over and out.”

“Whatever,” Kagami spat.

The static hum cut out. Connection terminated.

Ilyusha snorted.

Elpida shrugged. She said, “Okay, that’s one line of inquiry answered. If it is the same Necromancer then it’s not literally the same body. Which is … hmm.” Elpida trailed off. That could be very bad.

Pira spoke, rough and raspy: “What did it say?”

Elpida met her eyes. Pira looked like a walking corpse. “The Necromancer?”

Pira nodded.

Elpida said, “It taunted me a bit. It called me ‘dead thing’, same as before, so that implies it may be the same Necromancer. Then it gave me advice. It told me to keep my head down, to not get seen.” Elpida shrugged. “By who or what, it didn’t say. Kagami and Vicky mentioned that during their confrontation it used the term ‘central’s attention’. But what is ‘central’? I have no idea.”

Pira stared, blank and exhausted. Elpida stared back.

Eventually Pira said: “Necromancers. Out in the open. Talking. Because of you.”

“Yeah.” Elpida waited, but Pira did not offer further speculation. “Any idea why?”

Pira shook her head. The motion made her dressings crinkle.

Elpida said, “You and I, Pira. We need to talk. I need you to tell the truth. I have questions.”

Pira nodded slowly. “I will do my best to answer them, Commander.”

Elpida glanced at Ilyusha; she and Pira had been talking for some time already. Would Pira tell the truth now? Probably; she seemed defeated inside. Ilyusha just nodded.

Elpida smiled at Illy. “You two are getting on well. I’m surprised.”

Ilyusha grimaced and shrugged. “Shit in common. Sorta. S’not a reptile. Just a dumb fuck.”

Pira croaked: “I’m a fool. I’ve never been anything but a fool.”

Elpida considered Pira, wounded and wrapped in bandages, bleeding through her gauze and stitches, hunched beneath an armoured coat in an ancient chair. She said: “Ooni doesn’t think you’re a fool.”

Pira winced slowly. “Commander. Commander, I cannot justify what—”

“Pira,” Elpida interrupted. “I want you to tell me — what was The Fortress?”

Pira’s wince turned to a heartsick lament. She stared at a point on the floor, staring into the past. Her eyes filled with a sheen of tears.

Elpida waited. Ilyusha pulled a self-conscious grimace; Elpida guessed she’d already asked this question but not gotten a full answer. A few tears ran down one of Pira’s cheeks. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes.

“Pira?” Elpida prompted.

“The last defiant human dream,” Pira murmured. “The last attempt to build something in the ashes. A failure, betrayed, ruined and scattered. Like everything else.”

“Tell me about it, Pira,” said Elpida. “Tell me what you tried to build.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Necromancer, schneckromancer; Elpida ain’t afraid o’ no ghost. Or dream. Or hallucination? Or nano-machine info-wave broadcast? Hm.

A little something different this chapter, after the last few being so emotionally fraught. A dark creeping through Pheiri’s bowels after a visit from one of our elusive antagonists(???). The Necromancer hasn’t been on screen very many times so far, but I do enjoy making it as creepy as possible, and I hope that worked! And now Elpida needs to keep her word to the rest of her comrades, she’s not leaving them behind. But first, Pira needs to spill the beans.

No patreon link this week! Mostly because this is also the last chapter of the month! I hope you all have a wonderfully spooky Halloween, dear readers; Elpida sure will. In the meantime, here is this wonderful artwork of Pheiri, drawn by sporktown heroine, over on the discord server! There’s been a few different fan interpretations of him so far (including a virtual lego model, in progress), and I love them all.

There’s still, however, a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And thank you for reading! Thank you for reading my little story of heavily armed undead ladies and their weird journey through these rotten guts of a dead world. We’ve barely even begun! Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Discussion of genocide

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Elpida shut the bunk room hatch. She did not want Amina or Ooni to overhear this conversation.

Rainstorm static droned and drummed in a ceaseless black haze against Pheiri’s hull, a mirror to the dark exhaustion which throbbed at the edge of Elpida’s skull; thunder rumbled kilometres overhead, galvanic fury caged behind the soot-choked skies; engines and reactor purred and gurgled in machine homeostasis, far beneath Elpida’s feet. She turned back to Ilyusha — or Not-Ilyusha — seated on one of the bunks.

Ilyusha’s grey eyes were flat and dead, their molten fires extinguished.

Elpida said: “Who am I talking to?”

Not-Ilyusha shrugged, loose and limp and lacking. Her wrists lay slack over her knees, crimson claws tucked away inside black bionic fingertips.

“Don’t have a name,” she said. “Forgot.”

Elpida said, “I can’t just call you ‘Not Ilyusha’.”

Not-Ilyusha sighed and screwed up her eyes, as if enduring a terrible migraine. “I’m just the girl Ilyusha protects. That’s all I am anymore.”

“No,” Elpida said. “You’re also one of us. One of my—”

Cadre, Howl grunted, inside Elpida’s head.

“—comrades,” Elpida allowed. “That means I also protect you. If you don’t want a name then I won’t force one on you. But this conversation will be easier if I have something to call you.”

Not-Ilyusha peeled back her lips to show clenched teeth. “Noyabrina. Noya. That’ll do.”

“Noyabrina,” Elpida echoed. It was unlike any name she’d ever heard before, but that was hardly new. “Thank you, Noya. May I sit down?”

Noya relaxed her face and opened her eyes, cold and distant, mouth a tired line. She had none of Illy’s flame. She shrugged.

Elpida sat down on the opposite bunk. The beds were quite small — long enough for most people to stretch out on the scratchy blue sheets, but Elpida doubted she would be able to sleep here, unless she curled up on her side. The cramped space between the mattress and the underside of the next bunk required her to lean forward, which put pressure on the stitches in her gut. But sitting next to Noyabrina — or Ilyusha — would require her to move Illy’s shotgun. Noyabrina seemed uninterested in the weapon, but Elpida did not want to send the wrong message by relocating the firearm beyond Illy’s reach.

Elpida said: “You don’t agree with my decisions regarding Ooni.”

It was not a question. Elpida waited.

Raindrops drummed on Pheiri’s hull. Internal air recyclers hummed, hidden behind the metal walls. Noya’s grey eyes left Elpida’s face and drifted sideways. She stared at nothing.

Eventually Noyabrina spoke, in a slow, low, half-dead growl: “Said it yourself, Elpida. People like her killed all your sisters. Killed everyone. That’s what they do. People just like her killed everyone. Overran the city, surrounded the soldiers, herded them away. Then they burned us out, like rats. They put all my friends in a barn and set it on fire. Strung up my parents. Still remember my father’s body swinging in the wind. Can’t remember my name, but I remember that.” Her voice ground on and on, quiet but unstoppable. “Watched Stefaniya and Renat dig their own graves. Couldn’t do anything because I’d run away. They marched everyone else off, to go be slaves, help make guns and tanks to kill the rest of us. Only ones who survived were the ones who ran. We watched from the woods. Ran away. Lived in the woods like animals. Ate the dead, moss, grass. Died all the same.”

Elpida stayed quiet. She listened.

Noya’s lips began to curl upward in a smile — and there was Ilyusha, peeking through. “Came back with guns and bombs of our own — fuck ‘em up. Cut the rail lines. Blow up the reptiles. Burn them in their trains, dynamite their command posts, garotte their leaders. How’d you like it? Herded into a corner and machine gunned? We surrender, we surrender, wah wah wah.” Ilyusha mimed putting her hands up, then exploded in a shout — at Elpida: “Fuck you!”

The anger vanished instantly. So did Ilyusha. Noya was back, calm and dead eyed in the black static.

Noya said: “People like her. Reptiles and snakes. People wearing skulls.”

Elpida waited, to be certain that Noya was finished. Then she said: “Thank you.”

Noya snorted. “For what?”

“For doing your best to explain. I know this isn’t easy. I’m sorry. I know how I feel about my sisters, and what the Covenanters did to us. It sounds like the same thing happened to you.”

Noya said: “Then why don’t you shoot the reptile?”

Elpida said, “Why don’t you?”

Noyabrina frowned; that was Ilyusha’s mannerism, blurring the boundary. “What?”

Elpida explained. “I can’t stop you — Noya, or Illy, either or both of you. I’m not certain I would prevail in a close-quarters struggle against you, even when uninjured and well rested. Your bionics give you an incredible advantage.” She nodded at Ilyusha’s bionic limbs and the massive red-and-black tail coiled behind her on the bunk, the tip a shining scarlet spike. “You’re fast and strong and clever. I’m exhausted. I need sleep so badly that even sitting down is risky. I can’t move fast with this stomach wound. If you picked up that shotgun and ran to the infirmary, I couldn’t stop you from killing both Ooni and Pira.” Elpida smiled. “And there’s no military discipline here. You wouldn’t be punished. I wouldn’t be able to do so even if I wanted. The others wouldn’t find much fault with you. Maybe Melyn, seeing as she worked for hours to save Pira’s life, but nobody else.” Elpida shrugged. “The only thing holding you back is my orders. And those are just words.”

Noyabrina’s dead grey eyes slid sideways, off Elpida. “Not sure about Pira,” she said. “Shot you in the gut, but that was a mistake. Stupid. Idiot. Naive. Liability. Don’t have to shoot her though.”

Elpida made no effort to hide her surprise. “She used to be a Death’s Head too, didn’t she?”

Noya shrugged. “Used to be. Now she won’t eat.”

Elpida said, “That matters, yes.”

Noya nodded. “Can’t fake it. Doesn’t want to eat. No more cannibalism. Mm.”

“So, Pira left the Death’s Heads, and that counts. Ooni just did the same. She’s not a Death’s Head anymore either.”

Noya’s upper lip curled with disgust — more Ilyusha again. “She was one of them yesterday. Full of excuses, crocodile tears, justifications. We’ve been here as long as her. Didn’t feel the need to ink a skull on our skin.” Noya reached up with one hand and tapped her own chest, indicating the crescent-and-line symbol that Ilyusha had drawn on her torn tomb-grey t-shirt. “Chose this instead. There’s always a choice.”

“There is,” Elpida said. “But none of that answers my question. Why haven’t you shot her?”

Noya’s eyes sank. She stared at the gunmetal grey floor. “Ilyusha adores you. Trusts your judgement. Thinks you’re right. Thinks you can protect me too. But this makes her sick.”

Elpida nodded. She took a deep breath, and took a gamble.

She stood up and turned towards the bunks filled with equipment. She located and retrieved her submachine gun and the magazine; she had to go down on one knee rather than bend forward, to minimise the strain on her gut wound. Her mind throbbed with black static as she rose. She wavered for a moment, waiting for the pain to ebb, and for her vision to clear. Then she checked the weapon: the magazine had been properly removed and the chamber cleared. She made sure the safety was on, inserted the magazine, selected single-shot mode, and then pulled the charging handle back to chamber a round. She looped the strap over her shoulder and turned back to Ilyusha-Noyabrina.

Howl growled: Elps. What the fuck are you doing?

Proving my commitment.

Elpida! No! Don’t fucking do this! Stop!

Elpida ignored Howl.

Noya was frowning again — or was that Illy? Elpida could not quite tell where one set of mannerisms ended and the other began.

Elpida said: “Do you trust them?”

Noya grunted. “Eh?”

“Ooni and Pira. Do you trust them?”

Noya showed her teeth. “Fuck no. Fuck—”

Elpida interrupted: “Think carefully before you answer. This is a very specific and precise question. Do you believe that Ooni and Pira are now on our side? Or do you believe that either of them will betray us for the Death’s Heads? After everything you heard in there, do you believe Ooni was lying, or pretending, or trying to mislead us?”

Noya frowned hard, unable to reply.

Elpida continued: “I need you to respond. And I need you to tell me the truth.”

“What … what are you gonna do?”

Elpida’s mind was full of static and the sound of Howl screaming and raging, trying to drown out her thoughts. The air was full of rainstorm haze. She tasted the iron tang of blood in her mouth.

Elpida said: “If you say yes — if you think Ooni is lying, or that she presents a danger to us, or that she plans to betray us, or will plan to betray us in the future — then I will go in there right now and shoot her myself. Give me your honest answer. Say yes, and she dies, right now.”

Noya stared, mouth open, eyes wide.

Elpida said: “Do you think I’m wrong? Yes, or no.”

Noyabrina looked away, gritting her teeth. “No. No.”

Elpida took a deep breath. She let it out slowly. She double-checked the safety on her submachine gun, ejected the chambered round from the breach, caught it in one hand, and reset the charging handle. She sat back down on the bunk and placed her firearm to one side.

Fucking hell, Elps! Howl raged in the back of her mind. You made Ooni one of yours! You made a fucking promise! You bitch, you were really gonna do it! Fuck!

Of course I was, Howl. Shut up.

Noya looked up. She ran a shaking hand through her messy blonde hair. “You really would have shot her. Wouldn’t you? If I’d said yes.”

Elpida opened her hand. Ooni’s bullet lay on her palm. “I don’t want to kill Ooni. I made a promise to her. Two promises, really. That Pira has a place in Telokopolis, and so does Ooni. What kind of Commander would I be if I broke those promises of solidarity?”

Noya said, “But—”

“But if you don’t trust them, after everything you heard, then I will take responsibility. Right now I believe that the correct option is to allow Ooni to join us, and deal with Pira’s mistaken betrayal as a matter of internal discipline and personal history. But if the opposite is necessary, I will do that instead. I need you to understand, Noyabrina, or Ilyusha, or both of you. To keep this—”

Cadre! Howl snapped, inside Elpida’s mind.

Elpida relented. “To keep this cadre together, I will become whatever kind of monster is necessary.”

Howl said: Elps. Fucking hell. You–

I kept you and the cadre safe, Howl. It’s what I always did. You only died because I refused to do what needed to be done, because I could not keep us together. This time, for these comrades — for this cadre? No. I will do anything. Shut up and get back in line.

Howl growled and fell silent.

Noyabrina just stared, wide-eyed.

Elpida said, “Do I need to prove myself by bringing you Death’s Head skulls? I can do that. If I get lucky, I’ll bring you Yola’s head.”

Noya winced. She didn’t like that. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

“I will. Do you want heads?”

“ … nah.” Noyabrina looked uncomfortable. “Ilyusha, maybe. She—”

Crump-crump! Crump! Crack! 

A trio of high-calibre autocannon shots rang out, high up on Pheiri’s exterior hull, punctuated by the distant shatter of a concrete wall, tearing through the static of the rain. Noyabrina gasped and flinched and pressed her bionic hands over her ears. Elpida braced one hand against the upper bunk and one against the mattress below.

Elpida waited, but this time there was no slew to the side, no whirring of dozens of tracks, no deep-pulse throb of engine power from Pheiri’s guts. Seconds ticked by. Pheiri went clunk-clunk, cycling in fresh rounds. The sound was almost drowned out by the rain.

Elpida relaxed her grip and opened her palm again. Ooni’s bullet was still there.

Across the tiny, cramped bunk room, Noyabrina’s eyes were screwed up tight. She hissed through her teeth: “Ilyusha, please.”

Elpida placed the bullet to one side, then reached across the narrow gap between the bunks and took Noya’s shoulder. She squeezed.

Elpida said, “Let me protect you too.”

Noya’s face shifted. Her fear vanished. She rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck; Elpida let go and withdrew her hand. Noya slid her crimson claws from her bionic black fingertips and flexed her foot-talons, scraping across the bed. Her tail coiled upward and tapped the underside of the bunk above. She opened molten grey eyes. Her pale white face and blonde hair were framed by gunmetal walls and flaking cream paint.

Ilyusha said: “Hey.”

“Illy?” Elpida asked.

“Mm.”

“Is Noya still there? Or is it just you now?”

Ilyusha shrugged. Her tail bobbed. “Always here. Just behind.”

Elpida nodded; she knew she needed to explain herself further, but there was a question she needed to ask before she lost the privacy of this moment. She said: “Illy, you and Noya, was one of you the original? Did the other come into being after you were resurrected for the first time? Here, in this, in the nanomachine ecosystem?”

Ilyusha shook her head. “We’re like this from before. She got too scared, so I came along.” Ilyusha flashed an evil grin and waggled the crimson claws on one hand. “To pull out reptile guts.”

Elpida nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”

Doubting me, huh? Howl purred in the back of Elpida’s head.

Ilyusha said, “And you? You’re not alone in there, Elpi.”

Elpida pulled an awkward smile; she did not want Ilyusha to doubt her competence or sanity, but she couldn’t hide what had happened earlier. Amina and Ilyusha and Ooni had all heard the shift in her voice when Howl had spoken through her mouth.

“Yes,” Elpida admitted. “I’m not alone in here. There’s a voice in my head. Howl. She’s one of my dead sisters.”

Ilyusha bobbed her head sideways. “Say hi?”

Howl butted in, took control of Elpida’s voice, and said: “Heya bitch-tits. Nice claws.”

Ilyusha snorted, grinned, and made her claws slide in and out with a shick-shick sound.

Elpida cleared her throat. “Stop it, Howl. Illy, I’m not sure if Howl is real, or if I somehow made her up. Or if she’s a product of nanomachine self-modification in my brain. I don’t know, that’s why I had to ask. I only started hearing her after the Death’s Heads took me captive.”

At the mention of the Death’s Heads Ilyusha’s expression fell into a disgusted sneer.

Elpida took a deep breath, and said: “For the record, Illy, I think you have a point.”

“Not sharp enough to shoot the reptile, huh?”

“No,” Elpida said. “Not quite. But you’re still correct. I wouldn’t have chosen to recruit Ooni, but I made a promise in the heat of the moment, to get Pira out of there, to stop the two of them from shooting each other in some suicide pact. Now I need to keep that promise.”

“Promises to reptile fucks,” Ilyusha growled.

Elpida sighed. “Would I have made that promise if she wasn’t involved with Pira? I doubt it. If Ooni was more like Yola — Amina told you about Yola, yes? — then would I just shoot her? Probably. But whatever Ooni believed, she believes in Pira more. She loves Pira, and that was more important to her than the Death’s Heads.”

Ilyusha just snorted.

Elpida went on, partly to herself: “In an ideal situation, back in Telokopolis, we would have locked up all the Covenanters and shown them why they were wrong. But that wasn’t an ideal situation, we didn’t have control, they did. And this isn’t an ideal situation either. We’re a tiny band of nobodies, Illy. We have no ties to each other, only that we woke up alongside each other’s coffins. There is very little to hold us together.”

Ilyusha frowned. “Not true. Not true! You’re the Commander!”

Elpida made a gentle gesture with one hand. “And that’s why I don’t want to shoot her. If I kill Ooni, I have to kill Pira too. If we start turning on each other, eating each other, then it won’t matter that we’ve found Pheiri, it won’t matter that we’re protected, and well-armed. It won’t even matter if we get the combat frame up and moving. If we start eating each other, then this cadre, we’re over, we’re done.”

Ilyusha looked down. She traced patterns on the blue bunk room blanket with the tip of a claw.

“And we do need Pira,” Elpida said.

Ilyusha looked up and squinted. “Mm?”

Elpida considered lying; instead, she told the truth.

“Illy, I haven’t told this to anybody else, not yet. When I woke up inside the resurrection coffin, there was a message, on the tiny screen inside. It was on my left, and I recall it perfectly. It said: ‘A soldier? Don’t make me laugh, dear. At my age, laughing hurts like hell. You’ll eat each other before the end, like all the rest.’ Then I blinked and it changed. It said: ‘Good luck, dead thing’.”

Ilyusha just grunted. “Huh.”

Elpida repeated the relevant line: “‘You’ll eat each other before the end, like all the rest.’ And that — that I refuse to do. I still don’t know who or what sent that message. Maybe the graveworm, perhaps the Necromancer who stopped me up on the combat frame, maybe something else. But I know for absolute certain that I am not going to let us eat each other. And Pira? Pira refuses to eat.”

“Mmmmmm,” Ilyusha grunted, twisting her lips together.

“She’s onto something,” Elpida said. “I just don’t know what yet.”

“Mm. Don’t eat, can’t live. I don’t see it.” Ilyusha shook her head.

Elpida smiled. “Same here. Maybe if she’s right about the nanomachine production inside the graveworm, maybe that’s a way out of this cycle. Maybe.” Elpida tried to straighten up on the edge of the bunk, but the space was too small for her height. Where was she going to bed down in the long term? In the infirmary? The control cockpit? She had no idea. She still needed to explore the inside of Pheiri’s structure, in detail, preferably with Melyn to help. She went on: “Plus, in practical terms, Pira is a hell of a fighter. If we’re going to survive, I want her with us, I want her skills and her knowledge. Her courage too. She more than proved herself with the coilgun back there.”

Ilyusha flashed her teeth. “Was cool shit. She’s a fucking idiot shit-fuck stupid bitch. But yeah. ‘Kay.”

Elpida did want Pira, for her skills, her knowledge, her comradeship — but also for something less well defined, which Elpida tried not to think about too hard. She had not forgotten the fistfight with Pira, the rush and pleasure of close quarters combat, the feeling of pinning Pira to the ground, the sheer challenge that Pira had posed, and the moment of sexual friction which passed between them. Elpida respected Pira on a level she could not quite put into words, despite the gut wound. Ooni was necessary, but Pira was desired. Elpida knew it was not wise to act on that desire; even Telokopolan civilians and Legion soldiers did not share the kinds of bonds that the cadre had with each other. Her new comrades came from societies and time periods where that may seem even more alien.

But if Noyabrina had said yes, and Elpida had kept her word, she was not certain that part of herself would have survived executing Pira.

She wanted Illy too. And she did not have to leave that unspoken.

“Ilyusha,” she said out loud. “You’re a hell of a fighter too. I want you with us. With me. That’s why I had this talk with you. I value your trust, your trust in my judgement, and your arms at my side. I need you with us. Even if we barely know each other.”

Ilyusha grinned back. She flexed her crimson claws. Her tail did a little bob. She finally stood up from the bunk. Her metal talons clicked against the floor as she stretched out her bionic arms and rolled her shoulders.

Elpida went on. “I do have a question for you. If you’ve been around, doing this for such a long time, then why are you so closed-lipped?”

Illy shrugged, showing her teeth. “Never paid attention. Don’t want to think about it. Don’t want to think.”

“Fair enough. What about that?” Elpida pointed at the symbol on Ilyusha’s t-shirt, the crescent-and-line, scrawled in green camo paint. “What does it mean? I doubt Ooni’s going to give me an accurate answer, though I don’t think she’ll lie on purpose.”

Ilyusha looked down at the symbol on her own slender chest. “Means we’re all together.”

“Yeah?”

“Means … ” Illy raised her eyes and flashed her teeth. “Means Telokopolis rejects nobody? Right?”

Elpida sighed and smiled; Ilyusha had adapted the meaning. If she wanted more information she would probably need to ask Serin — assuming the sniper would attempt to make contact again. “Right.”

“Elpi, what now?”

“Ah? What now?”

Ilyusha flexed her fingers, making her claws go shick-shick. She tilted her head and waited — for orders.

“Oh,” Elpida said. “Right. What do we do now. Good question.” 

 Elpida’s body felt heavy as a sack of bricks, her limbs full of lead, her head stuffed with black steel wool. She cast her eyes up and around, over the gunmetal grey and flaking remnants of cream coloured paint. She was exhausted, but she was still the Commander.

She said: “We’ve found this crawler — Pheiri. Or he found us? Yeah, that’s better. We need to get Kagami and Vicky back. We should examine the dead Necromancer. And I must talk to that pilot, see if we can do anything for her. I don’t know what though. We need an atmospheric hardshell, but even if we had one, how would we get her into it? How could we isolate her from the nanomachines in the air itself?” Elpida shook her head. Ilyusha just watched. “Other than survival, I don’t know, Illy. Do we drive off into the city, protected inside Pheiri? Do we strike towards the graveworm, hoping to get inside? Can we raise the combat frame? I don’t know. I need more intel. I need a lot more intel. And advice.”

“Pheiri,” Illy grunted.

Elpida nodded. “Yes. He’s got a lot more to tell me, if I know how to ask. And he has a say, too. But right now I need to sleep. I really need to sleep. If I don’t rest, I’m going to fall down sooner or later. And if I sleep, I need to know that everyone here is safe. Understand?”

Ilyusha pulled a grimace. “Won’t shoot Ooni. Fine.”

Elpida shook her head. “That’s not enough. Ilyusha, while I sleep, you’re in charge.”

Ilyusha grimaced harder. Teeth together. Brow furrowed. “Yeah?”

“Yes, I mean it. Pheiri’s also in charge, yes, but you’re in charge of making sure things are safe on the inside. Watch Ooni, but don’t hurt her. Look after Amina. Make sure Atyle doesn’t wander off. Check on Pira. And talk with Melyn and Hafina, if you can. You need to know them, too. We all do.” Elpida picked up the bullet from where she’d left it on the thin blue blanket. She held it out to Illy. “I mean it, Ilyusha. I’m going to sleep, I can’t hold off much longer. You’re in charge. I trust you. You’re a good girl.”

Ilyusha stared at the bullet in Elpida’s hand, then at Elpida’s face, then back to the bullet.

Then Illy broke into an evil grin.

Ha! Howl barked. Told you she was like me. Were you trying to provoke this on purpose?

Elpida did not understand. Provoke what?

Ilyusha reached forward with one black-and-red bionic hand — claws out. But not for the bullet. She reached for Elpida’s face.

Razor-sharp bionic claws slid up Elpida’s cheeks, cupping her chin with augmetic strength, but gently, so very gently, gliding across the skin without drawing blood. Her fingers tightened on Elpida’s jaw, holding her in place.

Ilyusha leaned in — quick and sharp and rough — and planted a sudden kiss on Elpida’s lips.

Haha! Howl barked inside Elpida’s head. Conquered you fast, didn’t she!?

The attack withdrew as quickly as it had started. Ilyusha let go and straightened up. She plucked the bullet from Elpida’s hand and made it disappear inside her clothes. Then she whirled, tail banging on the edges of the bunks, and scooped up her shotgun. She pumped the action to empty the breach — click-click click-click click-click — dropping shells into the palm of her bionic hand. She shoved the shells into her clothing, to join Ooni’s bullet.

Ilyusha swung the now empty weapon upward and rested the barrel over her shoulder. She beamed with pride.

“Sleep good, Commander,” Ilyusha said. “I’ll watch the girls.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Sleep tight, Commander. Ilyusha’s got your back. And you’ve got her trust.

Whatever kind of monster is necessary, huh? Elpida’s walking on a knife’s edge here. Maybe she’ll be better once she’s gotten some sleep.

And! And! With this chapter, Necroepilogos is officially one year old! I’ve been writing and publishing this for one whole year. I said basically the same thing over in this week’s patreon post, but I want to repeat it for all the public readers too. When I started writing this, I had no idea if it would even get out of the first two arcs. I had a lot of doubt that I had what it takes to write this kind of crunchy, action-focused, sci-fi horror. I don’t actually have a lot of personal background in this kind of fiction (other than like, reading almost every WH40K novel ever published, but that’s not quite the same). So! Necroepilogos has gone even better than I ever imagined it would. Thank you, I couldn’t do it without you. And we’ve barely scratched the surface; the story so far is only the very first movement of what I have in outline and note form. The horrors are unending. So, as long as you want more, our zombie girls will yet endure, alone in the ashen afterword, with only each other for company.

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters ahead, or even more. I got a request for 5 chapters ahead, so I’m trying to see if I can somehow make that happen. Watch this space!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And hey, as always, thanks for reading! Thank you for reading my little story. Like I said above, the horrors endure, and so do our zombie girls; there is so much more story to tell. Until next chapter!

Content Warnings

Detailed discussion of fascist ideology
Exploitative bionic self-modification
Psychological interrogation techniques

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

This bitch is gonna lie through her teeth, Howl purred in the back of Elpida’s head. She’ll bark and whine like a good little doggy, anything you order her to say. And you already know why. ‘Cos she’s fucking terrified of you! Keep pushing and Ooni is gonna roll over on her back to show you her belly. Woof woof!

Elpida did not disagree.

Ooni was a mess. The woman was barely holding herself together; Elpida needed neither training nor experience to diagnose that. Crammed into the opposite corner of the tiny, bloodstained infirmary, perched awkwardly on that fold-out metal seat, wedged between the wall and Pira’s infirmary bed, Ooni made Elpida think of a cornered animal — lank and scrawny, like a starving fox. Or perhaps like a mollusc ripped from her shell, her armour gone, peeled down to her tomb-grey under-layers. Ooni’s olive skin had turned pale and waxen; long black hair was plastered to her forehead and scalp; her eyes were too wide, shining green irises ringed by raw red fear and sagging black bags. She kept one hand pressed tight against the gauze and dressing just below her left collarbone, beneath her t-shirt, where Elpida had sliced away the Death’s Head tattoo. She was trying to smile, but it looked artificial.

Pira lay on the infirmary bed just before Ooni, eyes closed, breathing softly, out cold. Ooni’s motivation. Her reason for turning on the Death’s Heads. Elpida knew she could not risk separating them, not yet.

Rainstorm static drummed on Pheiri’s exterior armour. Engine heartbeat throbbed through the metal floors. Ilyusha clenched her teeth hard enough to creak. Amina was silent, standing in the doorway.

Elpida waited for Ooni to respond to her order.

Don’t lie.

But Ooni just stared and smiled, frozen inside.

That was a bad sign; Elpida wanted the truth, no matter how ugly. She did not want Ooni to hide the putrefaction behind clean dressings. Like the grinning skull on her flesh, it all had to be extracted and incinerated.

Elpida replied to Howl: That’s the plan.

Howl snorted in disgust. Never knew you wanted a good little doggy, Elps. You gonna put a collar on her, have her bark for treats?

No. I don’t need unthinking submission. I would never have asked that from you, Howl, or any of the cadre.

Ha! Yeah. We would have eaten you alive.

Elpida nodded. I don’t need a beaten hound. I need a soldier, one who believes in what I’m offering. If that means breaking her first, to extract the poison, then so be it.

Eventually, when Ooni still did not answer, Ilyusha growled: “Better not fucking lie to us, reptile.”

Ooni flinched. Her smile vanished. She bobbed her head. “Y-yes. Yes, of course, Commander. Elpida. I mean. Elpida. I won’t lie.”

Elpida eyed Ilyusha’s shotgun, gripped in red-black bionic hands. Illy was up on her feet, clawed talons on the bloodstained metal floor. Elpida’s decision to conduct this interrogation with Ilyusha and Amina by her side — and with Ilyusha armed — was an unavoidable gamble. She could not break Ooni behind closed doors, or Ilyusha would never accept the outcome. She may not accept it anyway; Elpida knew her influence over Ilyusha was questionable at best. If Ooni did attempt to mislead — to minimise what she was — then Elpida could not guarantee that Ilyusha wouldn’t blow Ooni’s head off, right there in the infirmary. This was an all or nothing gamble.

Did Ooni understand that? Perhaps that was contributing to her nerves.

Look on the bright side, Howl chuckled. If it goes wrong, you’ll have some fresh meat for dinner.

Howl.

Joking! Joking.

I’m not so sure you are. If one of the cadre had died, would we have eaten the body? I think maybe we would.

Howl snorted. Elps, you’re delirious. You need to sleep.

I do. But not yet. My mind is clear.

Elpida was exhausted, both physically and mentally. Her belly throbbed with the slow burning pain of her gut wound, encased behind bandages and gauze and stitches and glue; the raw blue she’d poured down her throat would work magic on her flesh — but the pain did not yet begin to ebb. Exhaustion dragged at her limbs and eyelids. Her nervous system cried out for rest. She needed to remain seated on the secondary infirmary bed. If she attempted this interrogation while standing — hunched beneath the low ceiling of the infirmary — she suspected she would quickly start to waver and drift. The implication of Pheiri’s survival, of Melyn and Hafina, of the place they’d originated from — Afon Ddu — swirled in her mind like a fistful of cracked marbles, edges digging into her thoughts. She had so many questions. And the pilot, the pilot in the combat frame; she had to speak with the pilot.

But she couldn’t. Not yet. Even if Pheiri could return to that crater without coming under heavy fire, and drive them right up to the flank of the combat frame, Elpida would still have to mount and climb the exterior armour to reach the hatch, and then wriggle through the access tunnels. That would tear every stitch in her belly. She needed to let the raw blue do its work; she needed to sleep, probably for hours, preferably in Pheiri’s bunk room; she needed to make a plan to approach the combat frame a second time — maybe involving Hafina’s stealth field and the cover of night. Kagami and Vicky were reasonably certain the pilot was stable, despite her unseen wounds. Elpida had time.

But Ooni did not.

Ooni was Elpida’s responsibility now. She could not allow Ooni to form scabs over the wounds that Elpida and Pira had opened. Whatever Ooni had been to the Death’s Heads had to be excised, purged, and burned. Elpida had to make Ooni believe in the alternative.

Or she had to shoot both Ooni and Pira. There was no other choice.

Elpida said: “Thank you, Ooni. Let’s start by getting us all on the same page, with things we can all agree on.”

Ooni nodded. Ilyusha snorted.

Elpida gestured at Pira, unconscious on the other infirmary bed. “How much has Pira told you about the events since we left the tomb? How well do you know us already?”

Ooni hesitated. Her eyes flicked between Elpida, Ilyusha, and Amina.

Elpida let out a small sigh; she couldn’t help it, the exhaustion was cracking her self-control. “Ooni, I’m not trying to test you.”

Ooni nodded. She straightened in her seat. “Leuca — um, ‘Pira’ — she told me you made it out of the tomb, together. She told me how you — you, personally, Commander — how you defeated a zombie there. She told me some of the other stuff you did, the journey through this part of the city, to reach the mech. She told me the name of the place you came from, but I don’t remember—”

“Telokopolis,” Elpida said.

Ooni bobbed her head. “Telokopolis, yes. Thank you, Commander. She told me a little of what you said, the kinds of things you talked about. Your, um, names. I don’t remember all of those perfectly, I’m sorry. And she told me that you … you, Elpida, you personally … Leuca told me you are … that you might be … ‘special’.” 

Elpida sighed. “Like Yola called me a superhuman? Their future leader?”

Ooni shook her head — too hard, so eager to please. “No! No, not like that. Just … uh … I-I can’t explain this, it’s so—”

Ilyusha snapped: “Stop avoiding the question!”

Ooni flinched. She chewed on her bottom lip. Her dead green eyes hovered on Pira’s sleeping face. Elpida waited — this interrogation was rapidly diverging from her plans, but she’d never been trained in this ugly art. She was riding on her accumulated experience of managing the cadre. She could not afford to get this wrong. If she did, she would have to break all her promises to Ooni and Pira. And that might break the whole group. Nobody could trust a Commander who broke her word.

From the doorway, Amina said: “Elpida is special. Pira was right, about that.”

Ooni began to speak a moment later, haltingly at first, then gathering confidence. She did not look up from Pira’s face.

“Leuca was always so ambitious. She believed in things, even here, even in the afterlife. She believed that this, all of this, this never-ending rebirth, this hell, this land of death, that enduring this isn’t the only option. She always told me that us revenants, that we might be able to build something. A place to live? Society? A home? She never settled on one term. Just something that doesn’t get destroyed, eaten by zombies, or invaded by worm-guard for getting too big.” Ooni sniffed and wiped at her mouth. “And she also believed in … well … it sounds silly, but she believed in ‘keys’, or secrets, or something like that. I never really understood. She believed that we could find the fulcrum on which the world turns. Challenge the gods who made this. And … and we did. We did. For a while.” Ooni’s voice grew thick with sorrow. “We did.”

Elpida said: “We? You mentioned that you and her were together for twenty three years. Just you two, or are you talking about others?”

Ooni shook her head. She did not look up. “There were about a hundred of us. Biggest group I’ve ever known. This wasn’t the Dead-Heads, it was before the Dead-Heads, before either of us … joined them. We built a fortress — The Fortress.” Her lips curled upward with sudden fondness. “That was Leuca’s dream.”

“When was this? Where?”

Ooni shook her head. “I don’t know anymore. Decades and decades and decades ago. My memory gets so hazy. We cleared a tomb, we fortified it. We turned away a worm-guard — that was that finest moment I’ve ever known. She was glorious.” Ooni’s voice shook. Her eyes were wet with tears as she gazed at Pira’s face. She reached out and touched Pira’s hand, gripped it hard. “She showed me it was all possible. We lived there, or we tried to. We stayed when the graveworm moved on—”

Ilyusha growled: “Bullshit!”

Ooni looked very sad. “I don’t expect you to believe this. Nobody ever believes this. Nobody ever believes it’s possible. You wanted me to tell you the truth, so I’m telling you the truth, but nobody ever, ever believes this.”

Elpida said: “I believe you, Ooni.”

Ooni looked up, eyes wet with tears. “You do?”

Elpida nodded. “As long as one of us is up and breathing, the city still stands.”

Ooni blinked in confusion and wiped her eyes. She didn’t understand. But Elpida felt more respect for Pira, despite the betrayal, despite the gut wound, despite her and Ooni’s past with the Death’s Heads.

Pira too dreamed of Telokopolis, just by a different name.

Elpida put this ‘fortress’ to one side for now; she would have questions for Pira and Ooni about that later. For now she needed to focus on Ooni herself.

She said: “How does this relate to what Pira said about me?”

Ooni replied, “Leuca thinks you have the right idea. Maybe better ideas than she ever did. She said you’re … worth following.”

Elpida nodded. “And you don’t agree.”

Ooni flinched. “I-I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for putting my fist in your wound, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—”

Elpida raised a hand and smiled. “Ooni, I understand why you did that. I’m not trying to trap you.”

Ooni took several shaking breaths, then nodded. Elpida could see that she didn’t believe.

Elpida said: “Ooni, before we carry on, why do you call Pira ‘Leuca’?”

Ooni shrugged. “That’s her name. She never used to call herself ‘Pira’. I don’t know where that name comes from.”

Elpida stared at Pira’s sleeping face, all bloody and bandaged. “When she wakes up again we can ask her what she wants to be called, but for now I’m going to stick with Pira. You stick with Leuca. Deal?”

Ooni blinked several times. “Yes, Commander.”

Elpida said, “That’s not an order.”

Ooni answered with another awkward smile.

Elpida asked, “How did you and Pira meet, originally?”

Ooni’s smile turned from lead to gold. “She saved me. From the tomb. After … after … ” The smile collapsed. Ooni screwed her eyes shut. She started to shiver uncontrollably. “I-I stopped counting after f-fifteen rebirths. I don’t k-know when Leuca interrupted the cycle, but she— we— she was there- she— pulled me out of that— f-first time I survived more than two hours—”

“Stop,” said Elpida. She put a whip crack of command into her voice.

Ooni’s eyes flew open. She stopped.

Elpida quickly said: “Stop thinking about that. I apologise. You don’t need to answer that question.”

Ooni swallowed and nodded. She was panting. Ilyusha sneered and turned away. Amina was gazing upon Ooni with curious horror — she could probably intuit what Ooni meant. How many times had Ooni been resurrected and died before even making it out of a tomb? And then Pira had appeared before her.

Elpida backtracked, returning to the shape of her original plan. “Okay, Ooni, let’s focus on something else. I have technical questions for you. These should be easy. First, the Death’s Heads. I need to know things about them.”

Ooni sat up straighter. She composed her face into an eager mask. “Yes, Commander.”

Ilyusha snorted. “Reptile fucks.”

Elpida said, “I don’t need another primer on their ideology. I got enough of that from Yola and Cantrelle. From what you said before, they’re going to try to come after us, even if it doesn’t make any sense. Is that correct?”

Ooni nodded with great emphasis. “Yola is spiteful. I— I’m so sorry that I missed, with the plasma rifle bomb. Maybe if she was out of the way, maybe they might fall apart, fight each other first. But Yola, she’s … she’s good at making them all follow her, even when she’s not present. She’ll use every resource she has to get revenge. It’s what she does, especially if a … a ‘zombie’ kills a ‘person’. If one of the ‘weaklings’ gets one of us—”

Ilyusha spat on the floor and kicked a cabinet, bionic claws scraping down the metal. Ooni flinched.

Elpida said, “Please continue, Ooni.”

Ooni shrugged. “That’s all, really. She’ll go out of her way for revenge against anybody unworthy. If she captures any of us … it’ll be bad.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Elpida said. “Now, we’re currently beyond the graveworm line. Do you think she has the resources to push out this far, to attack us in force? She’s sent a few zombies already, apparently, but nothing more.”

Ooni’s eyes went wide. “We … we are? Beyond the graveworm line?”

Elpida nodded. “Pheiri can handle it, apparently. That’s the name of this crawler, this armoured vehicle. You heard it earlier, from Hafina and Atyle, but he’s a fully autonomous intelligence, not just a lump of metal. He chose to rescue us. Say thanks, he can hear.” Elpida modelled the behaviour; she glanced up at the ceiling, and said: “Thank you, Pheiri.”

She’d explained this to Illy and Amina already. They both copied her, Amina with an awkward murmur and Ilyusha with sudden grinning gusto.

Ooni hesitated for a moment, then copied the gesture: “ …t-thank you, Pheiri.”

“Well done,” Elpida said. “Now, can Yola attack us here?”

Ooni shook her head. “No. No, too many people all together would attract attention. She’s wary of that, going beyond the line, she always has been. Beyond the graveworm is full of … um … ‘degenerates’.” She glanced at Ilyusha as if expecting another outburst, but Illy just snorted. “But she’s afraid of them. Everyone is, but they don’t say it. If she’s sent people already, it’s just scouting. Maybe as punishment.”

Elpida decided this was probably the truth. Ooni was terrified of being retaken by her old boss. She would not knowingly give poor advice on how to avoid Yola.

“Good,” Elpida said. “Thank you. Now, Ooni, I’m curious about something. How does a group like that stay supplied? Mostly raiding the tombs? Or scavenging? Or some mechanism I don’t understand?”

Ooni bobbed her head. “Raiding tombs and scavenging, yes. We always have to make sure—”

Elpida allowed Ooni to speak without interruption — about tomb raiding, about conflict with other groups, about preying on the weaker, the smaller, the less well-organised. There was nothing new in Ooni’s information, nothing unexpected — no store of nanomachine calories tucked away in some ecological niche that only the Death’s Heads knew about. Ooni spoke about the harvesting of nano-mould — “Not good to eat, it fills you up but you don’t get anything from it.” That matched what Serin had said previously.

But then Ooni kept going without further prompting. She spoke about the vast patchwork of internal rules the Death’s Heads held to, the hierarchy of resource distribution, the internal competition over raw meat, cybernetics, and ammunition. The Death’s Heads had unspoken webs of dominance and ownership, over who got what, who got to eat first, who got the biggest share, and who had to fight over the scraps. Ooni knew all the details inside-out, both the explicit parts and the secret parts.

Elpida listened. The raindrops drummed on Pheiri’s hull. Distant thunder rumbled beyond the black sky.

Eventually Ooni trailed off. Her information was detailed, but of little use. The Death’s Heads ate each other in every way but the literal — and sometimes that too.

Elpida took a deep breath. Ooni was relaxed now, offering everything she knew. Time for the next step.

Elpida said: “I can’t help but notice you don’t have any bionics. I got the impression you were at the bottom of the … ”

Elpida was about to say ‘food chain’; but Ooni reacted by pulling up the hem of her t-shirt and pulling down the waistband of her grey leggings. She exposed her right hip. A fist-sized patch of flesh was oddly gnarled, like scar tissue but too neatly organized, with lines and corners. Ilyusha frowned at it. Amina peered closer.

“I-I have this,” Ooni said. “It’s not finished. I only … only managed to start making it. Bionics need a lot of meat. A lot of nanos.”

“And what is that?” Elpida asked.

“An internal ammunition manufactory. I’m turning a part of my organs into a bullet extruder.”

Ilyusha spat: “Fuck. Fucking! Fuck.”

Amina said, “Why?”

Ooni hesitated, then said: “To … to be useful.”

Elpida contained her disgust. “Is that important to supply and survival? Or is that something the Death’s Heads expected of you, because you were at the bottom of the hierarchy?”

Ooni swallowed. She couldn’t answer because she’d been ordered not to lie.

Ilyusha grimaced and rubbed her face. She looked like she wanted to vomit.

Elpida said: “Ooni, you have new orders. Cease production of that. You’re not a bullet farm.”

Ooni nodded awkwardly. She moved her clothes back into place to hide the ugly mass of altered flesh. Elpida couldn’t quite process this information. The Death’s Heads used the living bodies of their own members to produce resources. If done willingly, in the right context, perhaps such a role would be highly valued, supported, and protected. But Ooni had clearly been at the bottom of the pile — pressured, denied access to meat and nanomachines, forced into competition with her ‘comrades’. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy scrambled to make their bodies useful.

Ooni said: “Are you all like that?”

Elpida forced herself to concentrate. “Pardon, all like what?”

Ooni was staring down at Pira’s face. “Like Leuca. All not eating meat.”

Elpida sighed. “No. We can’t afford to be. We have to fuel our bodies, at the very least. But Pira made that choice, and I think I’m beginning to understand why. I respect her decision. She and I have a deal. I’ve offered her my blood, as a substitute, so at least she won’t starve.”

Elpida expected Ooni to flare with jealousy. But she just nodded, staring at Pira. Ooni said: “If she chose it, it must be right.”

Elpida said, “Why are you so sure?”

“Leuca was always right.”

Elpida tried to get this conversation back on track. “Ooni, when I witnessed you among the Death’s Heads, I got the impression that you were not respected. That the others were hurting you. What you’ve just told me about how they operate — they prey on others, and they prey on themselves.”

Ooni blinked up at Elpida. “Isn’t it like that everywhere?”

“Not with me it isn’t.”

Ooni said nothing. Elpida saw that she did not believe.

She had other questions to ask — about the crescent-and-line symbol, about Ooni’s knowledge regarding graveworms and tombs, about the growing of internal bionics. But Elpida could sense that this was the moment to press her attack. Other intel could wait. Ooni had opened up. It was time to charge.

“Ooni, let’s get personal,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Um … ”

Howl snorted: What kind of fucking question is that?

Ilyusha seemed to agree that this was a bit odd; she was squinting sideways at Elpida. Amina peered around the corner of the doorway too.

Elpida sighed and rubbed her eyes; was she so exhausted that she was misjudging this situation and talking nonsense?

She tried again: “Is ‘Ooni’ your full name? Do you have a family name? Anything else you go by? I want to know who you are.”

Ooni suddenly smiled. A tiny laugh escaped her lips. Elpida realised she’d taken the wrong track. Was Ooni not ready for this?

“Ooni—”

But Ooni said: “You mean before I died, the first time? Before all this?”

Ilyusha growled through her teeth. “What’s so funny, reptile?”

Elpida raised a hand. “Illy, let her speak. Ooni, yes, that is what I mean. Did you have a—”

Ooni laughed again, a weird little giggle. “I don’t even remember what ‘Ooni’ is short for. My first name — I remember that! I remember it because I taught it to Leuca. And she remembered it. It was Camula. That was her name — my name. Before we died. She died. The name died too. I’m just Ooni.”

Elpida nodded. Ooni was breaking and that was good, but she had not expected it to happen so quickly.

Break her fast, Howl purred. It’s a mercy.

Elpida said: “Ooni, where are you from? Or perhaps ‘when’ are you from?”

Ooni giggled again, grinning like a skull. Ilyusha bared her teeth and glanced at Elpida, but Elpida raised a hand to stall any interruption.

“You— you expect me to remember?” Ooni pointed at Pira. “Within a century of Leuca. That’s all we figured out.”

Elpida frowned. “You don’t remember your—”

“My village?” Ooni panted with that weird little laugh. When she spoke again, her voice cracked. “No, no I don’t remember what it was called, or what it looked like. Commander, I’ve forgotten the names of my parents. I remember that I had a sister. Well, maybe. Or maybe I dreamed that up. I don’t recall her name. It’s been— it’s been too long. You really are fresh. Fresh meat, Commander—”

“Hey!” Ilyusha snapped.

But Ooni didn’t flinch. Tears gathered in her eyes. “—and you haven’t been dead long enough to start forgetting. Let me ask you a question, Commander. Do you remember sunlight?”

Elpida said, “Yes. I do. Do you not?”

Ooni’s lips quivered, halfway between a laugh and a sob. “When I close my eyes really tight? No, not anymore.”

Elpida decided that Ooni wasn’t lying.

In the doorway, Amina looked pale and shaken. Ilyusha was baring her teeth — disgusted, or disbelieving? Elpida wasn’t quite sure. Ooni was shaking with the effort of controlling her tears.

Elpida said: “Okay, okay Ooni. You don’t remember, and that’s okay. If—”

Ooni started to laugh — panting, jerking, almost crying. “It’s not okay! Nothing here is okay. Just tell me what to do, Commander. Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it, I’ll do—”

“Ooni, slow down. Slow down.” Elpida took a deep breath, hoping Ooni would mirror her. “How long have you been—”

“Dead? Undead? I don’t know! Decades, a hundred years? I stopped counting! You can’t keep counting, you’ll go mad!”

Ilyusha barked: “Shut up! Stop interrupting Elpi!”

Ooni whirled on Ilyusha, wild-eyed. “And how long have you been here? Look at you! Look at your bionics! You’re a success! How many corpses did you eat for that?”

Ilyusha’s tail jabbed at the air. Her claws went shick-shick in and out of her fingertips. She made her shotgun go click-click. “Fuck you, reptile! You don’t know shit!”

“I know more than you!” Ooni howled. “How many times have you died?! Three? Five? Ten? Tell me! Tell me how many times!”

Ilyusha pointed her shotgun at Ooni’s head. “Shut up!”

Elpida raised her voice, hard and sharp: “Both of you stop, right now. Illy, lower that weapon. Ooni, face the front.”

Ilyusha snarled and lowered her gun.

But the command did not work on Ooni. She whirled back to Elpida, tears running down her cheeks, eyes wide with manic desperation.

“This is a trap!” she wailed. “Just— just do it! Just spring the trap! Stop this! I’ve told you everything I know. Stop torturing me, I can’t take it! I can’t- I can’t- I can’t-”

Ooni dissolved into dry sobs. Silence filled the tiny infirmary, the silence of raindrops and thunder. Deep inside Pheiri a machine was going ca-clunk ca-clunk ca-clunk; perhaps that was his attempt to break the terrible tension. Ilyusha had an ugly grimace on her face, uncertain and disgusted. Amina was wide-eyed with shock, staring at Ooni.

Elpida had fumbled this. She’d misunderstood Ooni completely.

She wet her lips and said: “Ooni, what do you think I’m going to do with you?”

Ooni answered in a tiny voice. “I don’t know.”

Amina spoke up: “We were only going to kill you.”

Ilyusha hissed through her teeth, face turned away. Was she ashamed?

Elpida had misunderstood the situation. This woman, this revenant, this truly ancient zombie, she was already broken. There was nothing left for Elpida to break. Was this how all revenants ended up, after too many years, too many resurrections, too many cycles of death and cannibalism? No wonder Ooni had made easy prey for the Death’s Head ideology. She was scoured inside, raw and aching, ready to be filled with pain.

Elpida wanted to end this here.

Allow me, purred Howl.

“Alright, let’s cut to the chase,” she said — as Howl spoke through her. Ilyusha frowned and Amina flinched; could they detect the change in Elpida’s voice? “We were gonna do this whole build-up thing, get info out of you as we went, but fuck that, let’s hit the button. Ooni, why’d you join up with the Death’s Heads? In your own words, just say it. No filter. You liked killing bitches? ‘Cos you got food there and didn’t have to fight too much for it? Or ‘cos Yola fucked your brains out every night?”

Ooni stared, shocked. She stopped crying.

Elpida-Howl went on: “You’re not arguing for your life. You already tried to kill Yola for me. You’ve got nothing to prove. Just tell me why. Explain to me. Teach me.”

Ooni glanced at Ilyusha — for help. Inside Elpida’s head, Howl snorted. Ilyusha just shrugged: sure, go ahead, the Commander’s off her rocker but she’s still the Commander.

Ooni swallowed, looked at Howl — at Elpida — and said: “I-I know it was wrong. I know they were wrong, I—”

Howl grabbed Elpida’s tongue and lips and throat: “Don’t lie to me!”

Amina flinched. Ilyusha barked a laugh.

But Ooni stood up and shouted back.

“What do you want me to say?! That they eat each other? They eat the weak? Of course they fucking do!” Ooni panted between her words. “Everyone does! It doesn’t matter how noble you try to be, everyone does it in the end! You— you don’t know what it’s like! Not all of us are superhumans! With a giant tank at our beck and call! This was your first time out of a tomb?! You don’t know what you’ve not had to endure! Do you know how many times I died before I made it out of a tomb just once? I stopped counting. Death, resurrection, death, resurrection, death, resurrection, over and over and—” She took a great panting breath, keening through her teeth. “I don’t give a fuck what you think of the Dead-Heads — if you shout that you’re one of them, they fucking come for you! Nobody else does! Nobody else ever does!”

The outburst made Amina back away and drew a snarl of anger from Ilyusha, but Elpida retained her composure.

Howl spoke through her lips again: “And why did you join them?”

“Because they’re organised! Because if you join them and you’re useful you get to eat! You get to be safe! There are rules about who can eat who, and when, and all sorts of other stuff! It’s safe!”

Howl spoke again: “Eating each other, but with rules. Real nice.”

Ooni jabbed a shaking finger at the half-empty cannister of raw blue nanomachines on the infirmary bed, right in front of Elpida.

“You’ll run out of that ambrosia eventually. And then what? You’ll eat other people, you’ll eat each other. Just like everyone else! You can’t resist hunger forever. It gnaws and gnaws and gnaws in your gut. We’re all just slaves to it! Slaves to the gods!”

Elpida said: “Except for Pira.”

Ooni’s anger vanished like a spark beneath the storm. All the fight went out of her. She looked down at Pira, out cold. Her tears cut tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.

She slumped back into her seat and buried her face in her hands. She began to weep — hard, wet, wracking sobs.

“I’m so filthy,” she wailed.

There, Howl said. She didn’t sound amused. Done. Have fun with the mess, Elps.

Elpida jumped right in; the wound was open, the putrefaction was exposed.

“Ooni, raise your head. Look at me.” Elpida put a touch of command in her voice. She kept her orders clear and simple. That was what this broken woman needed — orders from her Commander.

Ooni obeyed, still crying.

Elpida said: “You are no longer a Death’s Head. You ceased to be a Death’s Head the moment you took my deal. You are mine now. Do you understand?”

“No.”

Elpida tried not to wince. That was the truth, no doubt about it.

She tried again: “I trust your motivations, Ooni. Because you love Pira. That turned out to be stronger than whatever you believed, or whatever the Death’s Heads believe. They offered you protection, in return for subservience. You abandoned that for Pira. That’s why I believe you. I am offering you a place in Telokopolis.”

Ooni shook her head. “Telokopolis? I don’t … ”

“For now all you need to know is that Telokopolis rejects nobody. Telokopolis is eternal.”

“And … and Leuca has a place too?”

“Yes.”

Ooni sniffed. Her tears had not stopped, but at least she wasn’t sobbing. “I think you might be lying to me.”

Elpida said: “That’s fair enough. People like you murdered my sisters — my cadre, my world. I have every reason to reject you, cast you out, send you and Pira off somewhere, or just kill you both out of hand. And if you still wore the skull, I would. If you had fought against its removal, I would.” Elpida pointed down at the chest plate of Ooni’s armour, still lying on the infirmary bed before her; she could see the outline of the grinning skull which she had burned away with the cauterization wand, a shadow on the grey. But now the crescent-and-double-line of Telokopolis was drawn over the top. “If you were like Cantrelle or Yola, I would. But you’re not, you’re something else — you are capable of doing the right thing.”

“But … how do I … ”

“You do as your Commander says. You follow your orders. You hold to your comrades.”

Ooni panted slowly. Then she nodded. “O-okay. Yes, Commander.”

Elpida smiled. “Alright then. I still have a lot of questions for you, Ooni, but I hope our positions make a bit more sense now. You’re one of us. You—”

Ilyusha turned on her heel and stomped out of the room.

Her claws scraped on the metal floor and her bionic tail whacked against the wall; she shouldered her way past Amina, out into the crew compartment.

Elpida rose to her feet before the other two could react, despite the tug of stitches against the flesh of her belly; she’d been ready for this, but she wasn’t sure when or how it would happen. At least Ilyusha hadn’t just shot Ooni on the spot, that was a promising sign.

Elpida crossed to the doorway, bent beneath the low ceiling of the infirmary. She caught a glimpse of Ilyusha’s bionic tail vanishing around the corner of the opposite door — into the bunk room.

She put a hand on Amina’s shoulder before Amina could hurry after Ilyusha.

“Amina,” she said. “I need you to wait here with Ooni. You don’t have to say anything. Just wait here, please. Raise your voice and shout for me if anything happens.”

“But— Illy! Illy’s—”

“I’m going to help her. I need you to stay here with Ooni. Then you can comfort Illy as well, when I’m done. And you’re perfectly safe with Ooni. She’s one of us and she understands that. You don’t have to like her, though.”

Amina bit her lower lip and shot a very worried look at Ooni. Ooni looked equally shocked, but she tried to smile at Amina.

Elpida said to Ooni: “Stay there, soldier. You have permission to get up and stretch and get water. Don’t leave the infirmary yet. Watch Pira. Understood?”

Ooni nodded. “Understood.”

Amina nodded too. She took out her knife and stared at Ooni. That would have to be another acceptable risk.

Elpida stepped out into the crew compartment. The jumbled corridor which led to the control cockpit was quiet and empty; Ooni’s weeping and shouting had not drawn Melyn and Hafina away from their conversation with Atyle. Elpida breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t certain that the pair of ARTs would understand all this, not yet, not without considerable additional explanation. Pheiri probably did though.

She quickly crossed the crew compartment and stepped into the bunk room. The narrow space between the bunks was barely wide enough for Elpida’s shoulders. The rain was louder here, perhaps because this compartment was closer to the hull. The tight-packed lower bunks were mostly crammed with equipment, weapons, the coilgun, and the other pieces of Ooni’s armour, as well as the one bunk stacked entirely with Melyn’s books.

Ilyusha was sitting cross-legged on one of the two empty lowest bunks. Her bionic legs were crossed, claws digging into the thin mattress. Her red-black arms lay limp on her knees. Her shotgun was discarded next to her, beyond arm’s reach. Her storm-grey eyes stared at nothing.

Elpida said: “Illy?”

Ilyusha looked up and met Elpida’s eyes. Empty, placid, melancholy.

Elpida had seen this once before, when they’d fought Serin together. A different side of Ilyusha had briefly emerged, fragile as a cobweb in the wind.

Elpida gambled. “Not Ilyusha?”

“Illy can’t deal with this,” said Not-Ilyusha.

“Deal with what?” Elpida asked.

“You, refusing to kill the reptile.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Illy’s got a good fuckin’ point.

Well, this arc certainly got intense, in perhaps unexpected directions? Elpida’s doing a hell of a balancing act here, and even I’m not entirely sure if she’s correct in her judgements. On the other hand, Ilyusha (or Not-Ilyusha) is quite certain that this is fucking bullshit. Whichever way Elpida pulls, the group is starting to break. And she really, really, really needs to lie down and sleep. So! Probably 3 chapters left in this arc, I think. I’m not entirely certain which way things are about to go, so we shall see!

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters ahead, or even more. I got a request for 5 chapters ahead, so I’m trying to see if I can somehow make that happen. Watch this space!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And, as always, thank you so much for reading my little story. I couldn’t do it without you! Next week is actually the 1-year anniversary of Necro, so, uh, I might say a bit more than usual then! Thank you so much, dear reader. We have so much further to tread in this ashen afterword.

Content Warnings

Minor surgery
Surgery without anesthetics
Rape metaphor (this is literally a single sentence, it’s not extended or anything)
References to torture

Also: yes, this chapter is from the perspective of a fascist. No, being a PoV character doesn’t mean the author thinks she’s correct or good or right or anything like that, no matter how pathetic she is. I feel like the rest of the story and themes so far should make this clear, but I want to spell it out, just in case.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Ooni jolted awake.

Gunmetal walls, surgical tools, and the stench of dried blood; raindrops drumming hard beyond a thick metal shell — and the deep heartbeat throb of a powerful engine below her feet. Empty-handed, unarmed, peeled out of her carapace; her flesh was protected by nothing but a few flimsy layers of grey cloth. Thirsty and hungry and disoriented, sore from head to toe, with a gun pointed at her face.

Ooni remembered where she was and what she had done. She swallowed her panic. She decided to stay very quiet.

This was the infirmary, inside the giant armoured vehicle which belonged to her new ‘allies’. She’d woken up in much worse places than this. All her limbs were still attached. Nothing was trying to eat her. She wasn’t chained to the walls.

She had betrayed everything — Yola, the Dead-Heads, her oaths. All for—

“Leuca!” she whispered.

Leuca was right in front of her, lying on one of the two narrow medical beds. She was unconscious, half naked, covered in wounds and dressings and stitches. She looked just as she did in Ooni’s memories, as if all the decades—

Ooni caught herself. She snatched back her hand. She had to get a grip, and quickly. If she focused on Leuca she would start to weep. The rainstorm outdoors had masked the tiny sounds of her waking up, but open tears would draw attention.

And then she might not have time to be ruthless and cunning.

Ooni steadied her heart with a single deep breath, then stopped breathing, and took stock.

The others hadn’t moved her in her sleep — she was still crammed into the corner of the infirmary, on a fold-out metal seat attached to the wall. She wiped a thin trickle of drool off her chin. Her wrists and ankles weren’t bound, either. That made no sense; she had expected to wake up in chains, or locked inside some tiny prison compartment. She’d accepted that as inevitable, as part of the price for Leuca’s safety. They’d even let her keep her clothes — a tomb-grey t-shirt, some baggy leggings, and her cloak for extra warmth.

Why wasn’t she restrained? This group couldn’t possibly be as naive as Leuca had suggested, could they?

Ooni tried not to think about that. The alternative was that they’d left her free on purpose. And that was terrifying.

The infirmary was a wonder — a real medical facility, well-stocked with surgical tools and sterile dressings, a pair of beds, and even running water. The room had looked pretty clean too, at least prior to the little ART doing all that surgery; now the metal floor and the beds were covered with dried blood. Ooni would gladly get down on her knees and scrub every corner, just to see it shiny and neat and hygienic again. She could have cried at the luxury. She hadn’t seen anything like this since the Fortress — and that was a dim memory these days.

The little zombie with the extensive bionics — what was her name again, Ilyusha? — had fallen asleep sitting next to the door. She was still pointing her shotgun at Ooni, but at least her finger wasn’t on the trigger. An open backpack stood at her side. Five cannisters of raw nanos were inside, ripe for the taking, out in the open, unprotected. Ooni’s stomach clenched. Her throat bobbed. Her hands quivered. But she tore her eyes away; that shotgun muzzle was very wide and very dark.

The bulkhead hatch was open, but Ooni couldn’t hear any sounds from the larger chamber beyond.

Elpida and the little ART were gone. Elpida’s armoured coat lay over the foot of the empty bed.

That was very bad.

Ooni was no fool. She knew this group had not accepted her; Leuca — in her beautiful but blind brilliance — had betrayed them in a moment of god-spawned madness. Ilyusha wore the mark of the Wreckers and Murderers drawn right on the front of her t-shirt, and Elpida wore it daubed in blood. Only Elpida’s authority protected Ooni and Leuca from execution or cannibalism.

And what if Elpida changed her mind?

Elpida was a leader, just like Yola — or like Omur, or Heidelwiss, or Cece, or a dozen others Ooni had known. According to Leuca this group was young, absurdly young, a week fresh from the tomb. But that wasn’t possible, it made no sense. Leuca had told her the details — the kinds of details which mattered to Leuca’s singular brilliance. These people were mostly fresh meat, first-timers, disoriented and confused. But they’d banded together and made it out of a tomb — first try! Elpida had killed a monster, outfought highly modified revenants, and led this group of nobodies and nothings to that mech out there in the crater. And now they had an armoured fighting vehicle, an ancient machine from beyond the graveworm line.

Ooni wouldn’t have believed that from anyone but Leuca — and maybe Leuca was mistaken, or being tricked, or forced to lie. If that was true, then this group would degenerate like all the rest. Sooner or later they would fall to self-destruction, like all others except the Dead-Heads. And they had no structures to control the orgy of feasting that would result. No beliefs, no guidance, no guardrails. Just Elpida. Just another leader. They would eat each other.

And if Leuca was wrong, if this group was more experienced, as Ooni suspected, then why had they not bound her, or eaten her?

She was either in a den of monsters or aboard a ship of fools.

Ooni started to shake; the latter she could escape, but the former she dared not contemplate, or she would panic.

Instead she finally allowed herself to look at Leuca.

This woman was the reason she needed to stay calm.

Leuca was horribly wounded, covered in bandages and gauze and stitches. She had a pair of terrible head wounds; half her neck and jaw and cheek were closed up with a mass of ugly stitching. Her fire-bright hair was dirty with blood. She looked like a corpse. Ooni prayed to gods she had long since abandoned: please don’t be in a coma, please let her wake up soon.

Four subjective decades since death had parted them, since Ooni had seen that pale, freckled face, heard that crunchy, iron-hard voice, and felt the touch of hands just a little too rough and clumsy — give or take a few years, of course; the dozen or so resurrections since then made it difficult for Ooni to keep track.

But Leuca had changed. Ooni always knew this was a risk. Leuca’s core was the same — the same stubborn, cold, unbreakable willpower, the same vulnerable idealism lurking below the surface. But now it was applied to things which Ooni did not understand. Like refusal to eat.

But this was still Leuca. She must be right about the eating thing. Leuca was always right.

And she’d called Ooni a fucking traitor for joining the Dead-Heads.

Leuca was always right.

So Ooni was a traitor.

To what? To Leuca? To the memory of the Fortress? To the gods?

Ooni felt a sob building in her throat. She had to stay quiet. She had to be smart, and swift, and clever, and—

“Leuca,” she whispered. She stared at Leuca’s closed eyelids, her bloodstained brow, her slack lips. “Leuca, it’s not the wounds.” She sobbed once, almost a laugh. “I’ve seen you wounded worse than this. Remember when— when you lost your left leg? O-or the— the hounds, that one time at the Fortress? The third year, I think. T-that was really bad. You were in pieces. You almost died. I cried over you for a week. I fed you by hand. I fed you all the pieces of Vount, and Bea, and Patty. Do you still remember that? I forget so much about the Fortress now, but I remember everything you and I did together. B-but it’s not that. Leuca, I hadn’t seen you in decades. I’ve missed you so much. I didn’t know if you even came back. I-I never meant to betray you, I was just trying to stay alive, it got so … so tiring, dying. I just wanted it to stop. I’m sorry.” She swallowed hard. She had to control herself. She stared at Leuca’s dented bionic arm. “That’s new. I wasn’t there for that. How did you get it? Was it after my time? After the Fortress? After we both … both died.”

Ooni wiped her eyes and swept her hair out of her face. She needed clarity of mind. She needed to act. She needed to take initiative. But she was always so bad at this. The Dead-Heads had given her purpose and place for six years, and she hadn’t needed to think; then Leuca had told her what to do, to sneak the hidden cannister of blue to Elpida when she was imprisoned. That had seemed insane, and it had hurt, but Ooni had done it anyway.

Then Elpida had given her orders, and the world had made more sense.

She wished Leuca was awake to give her orders.

“I can’t do this alone,” she whispered. “Leuca … Leuca, please wake up and tell me what to do. Please.”

Leuca didn’t stir.

Ooni screwed up her eyes and pressed her face into her hands. She mustn’t cry. The rain would not drown out her sobs.

She’d grown skilled at smothering her emotions among the Dead-Heads. Grown numb and empty. Weakness was unsafe. But since the moment she’d seen Leuca again all her self-control had begun to break down.

She took slow, shallow, shuddering breaths.

She needed to flee, with Leuca. She didn’t know where her armour or weapons had been taken; Ilyusha hadn’t let her see. This armoured vehicle couldn’t be that large, but the zombies had probably locked all her stuff away. She would escape empty-handed if need be, carrying nothing but Leuca. Into the city, into the ruins. They would eat mould and carrion, sleep in holes, take refuge in each other’s body heat; they’d done that before, they could do it again. Living as barely-human scavengers would be worth the privation, just to be together, to be alive alongside each other once more. Surely Leuca would agree? But what about the no-eating thing? And Ooni couldn’t return to the Dead-Heads, not after she’d helped kill two superiors.

Oh! And also not after she’d tried to assassinate Yola with an improvised plasma explosive.

Ooni smiled at that memory, behind the shield of her hands.

Where had that courage come from? She needed it again now.

To escape she would need to pick up Leuca, step over Ilyusha without waking her, get past anybody out there in the crew compartment, and get this machine to open the rear airlock hatch.

Or she could tackle Ilyusha now, while she was still sleeping, wrestle the shotgun out of her hands, and—

And what? Shoot her?

Ooni had pledged her allegiance to Elpida — in return for a guarantee of Leuca’s safety. The orders had felt good. She hadn’t been pretending. Escaping was one thing, that was not a betrayal. But murdering her allies was different. Then again, Ooni had pledged her allegiance to Yola too, in a much bloodier ceremony, with a great deal more gravitas. She had pledged her body and soul to the cause of the naked skull. But then her ‘sisters’ were going to murder Leuca, and she’d discarded her oaths without a second thought.

And then Elpida had sworn to protect Leuca.

And she had! She hadn’t abandoned them, hadn’t left them behind! When Leuca had attempted to sacrifice herself for the sake of these people, Elpida had sprinted to catch her.

Ooni’s mind went around and around: these people were fools, or they were terrifying; Elpida had saved Leuca, even after being betrayed; Ooni was unbound when she woke — and what did that mean? None of this made sense. How had this group survived this long if they were this naive? It was impossible. There was something hidden here, something she wasn’t seeing, and that unseen monster would eat her alive the moment her back was turned, and she and Leuca would be separated again for decades. She couldn’t take that a second time. Maybe they would never reunite again. Maybe Leuca wanted to give up and stop coming back. Maybe there would be no third chance.

What if she stole the shotgun, but used it only to threaten? Would they let her and Leuca go? What if she took a hostage? Ilyusha wouldn’t work for that, not with all her bionics. What about the little ART? Maybe. She seemed pretty defenceless. Ooni didn’t feel that courage again, but at least this was a plan.

She finally took her hands away from her face. There was a water tap on the other side of the room; she could creep over there and drink and then—

“You’re awake.”

Ooni jumped. Her hands scrabbled for a sidearm she didn’t have.

One of the zombies was standing in the doorway — the short one who’d been imprisoned alongside Elpida. Ooni hadn’t even heard her approach. She looked utterly harmless, petite and plump, with puppy-fat in her cheeks, her frame swamped by a tomb-grown coat. But Ooni knew better; this one had fought like a cornered fox when the Dead-Heads had taken her. She was a biter.

And now she was holding a naked combat knife.

Ooni struggled to recall the girl’s name. She had to memorise the names as quickly as she could. If she couldn’t escape then her best shot at survival was to make them see her as a person.

“Amina,” Ooni whispered. She prayed she’d gotten it right. “I’m— I’m Ooni. A-and yes, I’m awake. Let the others sleep?”

Amina chewed her bottom lip. She glanced down at Ilyusha.

Ooni whispered: “Please don’t wake her up.”

Amina frowned at Ooni, suddenly afraid.

Ooni showed her empty hands, and quickly added: “I-I think she might get angry with me, just because. Look, I don’t have any weapons. I’m not going to hurt you or anything, I’ll sit right here, I—”

“Illy,” Amina said. “Illy, I think you should wake up now. Illy, please wake up. Illy.”

Ilyusha snorted, stirred, and woke up. Her red and black bionic hands tightened on her shotgun. Her crimson talons scraped on the metal floor. Her massive tail-spike tapped against the wall. She shook her head, glanced up at Amina, then over at Ooni. She blinked bleary iron-grey eyes. Her lips peeled back in a sneer.

“Ami?” she grunted. “You okay?”

Amina replied: “She said I shouldn’t wake you up. So I woke you up. I’m sorry, Illy. I had to.”

Ooni tried to explain herself. “I-I thought you needed sleep, I—”

“Shut up, reptile,” Ilyusha growled. She made her shotgun go clunk, then clambered to her feet, claws scraping on the bloodstained metal floor. She stretched her tail, then coiled it over one shoulder. She cracked her neck left and right. She cradled her left arm awkwardly — still injured. She kept her weapon pointed at Ooni, then turned her head slightly to address Amina: “S’fine, Ami. Right choice. Don’t listen to her. Where’s Elpi?”

Amina said, “I think she went to the front of this … um … house?”

“Tank,” Ilyusha said. “Really big tank.”

“Tank,” Amina repeated carefully. “Tank. Thank you, Illy. Elpida went to the front. She’s been talking to the others. I heard them.”

Ooni said, “May I—”

“Shut up!” Ilyusha spat. She jerked her shotgun forward. “Fuck you!”

Ooni kept her hands visible. “Please … ”

Ilyusha mocked her: “Please, please, please. Shut the fuck up.”

Amina said, “She hurt Elpida really badly. When we were tied up. She stuck her hand into Elpida’s tummy.”

Ilyusha’s eyes twitched. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” Amina said. “She—”

Ooni said: “I brought her the blue! I brought her a dose of raw blue! There was no other way to get it to her without being found out! Leuca—” Ooni gestured with her head. “Leuca told me to. It was her secret stash. We helped the Commander. We did!”

Ilyusha gritted her teeth. “Ami, truth?”

Amina swallowed. “She did. But I saw her face. She enjoyed it. Enjoyed hurting. She hates Elpida.”

Ilyusha growled: “Yeah?”

Ooni swallowed. She dared not tell the truth — she had enjoyed it, but the pleasure was a bitter medicine. She’d burned with white-hot jealousy; Leuca’s faith in this ‘Elpida’ was blinding, clearer and more devoted than even their time at the Fortress. And Leuca had called Ooni a ‘fucking traitor’ compared to this— this— nobody! This nothing! This fresh-meat filth!

But that was all gone now. Leuca was always right.

Ooni felt a sob building in her throat.

Amina said, very quietly: “I think I enjoy hurting too. But I’m on Elpida’s side. She’s not. We should get rid of her.”

Ilyusha bared her teeth in a nasty grin. She flexed her hands on the shotgun.

Ooni said quickly, “Elpida told us all to get along! She told us all to get along, you both heard that! And I’m— I belong to her now. I do. I belong to Elpida. She’s my Commander. Just like you. We have an agreement. I haven’t broken it!”

Ilyusha snorted and flicked her shotgun’s safety off. Amina lowered her eyes and looked at the knife in her fist. Ooni opened her mouth to scream.

A voice interrupted, from the compartment beyond the infirmary.

“She’s right,” said Elpida.

The Commander stepped out of the gloom behind Amina. The rainstorm static on the hull must have masked her approach.

The other two zombies turned to look. Amina blushed and hid her knife behind her back; Ilyusha flicked the shotgun’s safety back on. Elpida gave Amina’s shoulder a squeeze, muttered, “sheathe that, please,” then stepped past her and into the infirmary. She placed a hand on Ilyusha’s shotgun and forced the muzzle to point at the floor.

Elpida said: “Ooni is mine now. No summary executions — not her, not Pira. Do you both understand?”

Amina hung her head, hiding her eyes with one hand, consumed by shame. But Ilyusha peeled back her lips and snapped: “She’s a fucking reptile!”

Elpida said: “Yes. She’s my reptile now. My responsibility. You understand, Ilyusha?”

Ilyusha frowned, not quite convinced.

Elpida nodded to Ooni. “Ooni, did you sleep well?”

Ooni nodded back; a lie, absurd and obvious. She’d slept in a metal seat with her head against a wall. But something about Elpida commanded agreement.

Elpida said: “Don’t lie. Did you sleep well, or did you sleep like shit?”

Ooni swallowed. Was this a test? No — it was an order. “I … I slept like shit, yes. I’m sore and stiff. My neck hurts. S-sorry for lying.”

Elpida smiled. “That’s better. Thank you.”

Ooni flushed.

Elpida was god-like; that was the only explanation. Ooni had seen plenty of highly modified zombies get taller than her, or pack on more muscle, or exert more raw intimidation — but Elpida was apparently near-pure baseline; she looked as she had in life — seven feet tall, rippling with densely corded muscle, tight and toned and sleek and sharp, with the shining white hair of some god-touched seer, and purple eyes burning like spirits in the night sky. She spoke with unquestioned authority and moved like a giant cat on the hunt. She was stunningly beautiful. Right then she was also casually half-naked, topless, tits out, with just a t-shirt draped over her shoulders. She showed no trace of self-consciousness or embarrassment.

She was hunched to fit into the infirmary, the dressings on her gut wound showed a thin line of crimson stain — the pain must have been incredible — and her eyes were ringed with dark shadows of exhaustion. But none of that slowed her down.

Perhaps Yola was correct, maybe Elpida was superhuman; if Ooni had met Elpida in life she would have assumed this woman was the result of a coupling between a mortal and a god.

Perhaps she was. Perhaps the gods Ooni had forsaken were not quite as dead as she believed.

Elpida said, “Illy, Amina, I need to talk to both of you, to keep you in the loop. We have plans to make. Let’s go to the bunk room.” She pointed at the bag on the floor, which contained the five cannisters of blue ambrosia. “Illy, please bring that as well. Ooni, I’ll be back shortly. Stay right there. Try not to wake Pira.”

Ooni nodded, then quickly said, “Yes, Commander.”

Ilyusha grabbed the bag and shot Ooni a sneer, as if Ooni had been planning to pour all the nanos down her throat as soon as everyone’s backs were turned. Ooni couldn’t deny the idea had crossed her mind. Ilyusha looked at Leuca with even more venom, then followed Amina and Elpida out of the infirmary and into the larger compartment. Ooni watched the trio cross the space and step through the matching door on the opposite side. They closed the hatch after them.

Ooni stayed right there in her seat. She didn’t breathe. She tried to listen — she heard Elpida repeat something several times, and Ilyusha protesting. But she couldn’t make out any actual words over the drumming rain and the throbbing engine.

Were they discussing her?

She stood up to stretch her muscles, but she dared not cross the room to fetch herself a cup of water. What if Elpida looked to make sure Ooni was obeying? This might be the first of many tests, to see if she would attempt to escape, or do exactly as she was told.

It felt good to do as she was told. She stayed where she was.

Several minutes crawled by. Rainstorm static filled in the air. Ooni reached out and touched Leuca’s hand, lying on the medical bed. She was warm. That was good.

Eventually the door on the far side of the big compartment swung open again. Elpida emerged carrying one of the cannisters of blue ambrosia. Ilyusha and Amina followed her back to the infirmary. Amina was cradling Ilyusha’s shotgun in both arms. Ilyusha was carrying the chest plate of Ooni’s armour carapace — and grinning.

Elpida stepped back into the infirmary, nodded to Ooni, and sat down on the empty bed. Ilyusha placed the grey-white armour chestplate next to Elpida; the front showed the Dead-Head symbol, the naked skull, still smothered behind a smear of Elpida’s blood. The blood had dried and turned dark brown.

Amina hovered in the doorway. Ilyusha returned to fetch her shotgun, then made a big show of pointing it at Ooni and swishing her tail.

Elpida peered at the bloody smear on the armour. “I’ll need water first. Illy?”

“You go first,” Ilyusha said. “You first!”

Elpida smiled and sighed. She nodded, uncapped the cannister of raw blue, and drank one large mouthful of the glowing fluid. Then she offered the cannister to Ilyusha,

“Again!” Ilyusha snapped. “One’s not enough! You need more.”

“Illy, I can’t monopolise this.”

Ilyusha bared her teeth. “Sleep or drink! Sleep or drink!”

Amina spoke up too: “I think … Elpida should maybe … maybe sleep?”

Elpida sighed again. “I will sleep, but not yet. We need to deal with this first.”

Ilyusha snapped: “Then drink! You have to go out, right? It has to be you! You have to see it yourself! Drink more!”

Elpida looked like she might argue, but then she relented. She drank another large mouthful of raw nanomachines. Ilyusha finally accepted the cannister and drank a smaller dose of her own. She offered it to Amina, but Amina shook her head.

Amina said: “I didn’t get hurt. Not at all.”

Elpida said, “You’re one of us, Amina. That means you get a share.”

“But I didn’t get hurt.”

Elpida said: “Then just have a sip. Just wet your lips. For me, please, Amina.”

Amina looked very uncomfortable, but she stepped forward, accepted the cannister, and took a tiny sip of blue. Elpida recapped the bottle and placed it next to her on the infirmary bed. Ooni couldn’t tear her eyes away from the cannister; her stomach was clenching with the hunger for meat, for raw fuel, for nanomachine replacements. Wasn’t she one of them now? Didn’t she get a turn too? Maybe this was the proof. Maybe this was Elpida pulling off the mask.

Ilyusha sneered at her: “None for you, reptile fuck.”

Elpida said, “Illy. She’s one of us too — or she’s going to be. She’ll get her turn. Just not yet.” Ilyusha spat on the floor, but Elpida ignored that. “Once we’re done here, Atyle gets some as well. Kagami and Vicky will have to wait.”

Amina said, “What about Melyn and Hafina?”

Elpida said: “That’s very sweet of you, Amina. But I don’t think their bodies work the same way as ours do. We’ll have to find some other way to share with them.” She glanced at Ooni. “Ooni. ARTs — artificial humans — you knew what that meant. Do they need nanomachines, like us?”

Ooni shrugged. “I don’t … I don’t know. Sorry.”

Elpida nodded. “Right.” She gestured at Pira. “She’s out cold, huh?”

Ooni nodded. “I think so. I touched her hand. I-I hope she’s not in a coma or anything.”

Elpida smiled and shook her head. “I saw her wake up earlier for a few seconds. She’s not in a coma.”

Ooni’s heart flooded with relief. “Oh. G-good. Thank you. Thank you.”

“And if she’s secretly awake and listening to us, that’s fine too.”

Ilyusha growled: “Hope she stays asleep.”

Elpida said, “Illy, can you bring me some water, please?”

Ilyusha fetched the tin mug from the tiny counter top and filled it with water. Elpida dipped two fingers in the liquid and used it to wipe away the worst of the blood which concealed the skull. The grinning back Dead-Head symbol emerged from a bloody swamp.

Elpida said: “Ooni, what is this painted on with?”

Ooni tore her eyes away from the tin mug. “Uh … um … s-some kind of tar, I think. I inherited the suit.”

Elpida nodded. “Are you thirsty?”

Ooni swallowed. “Yes. Very. Please may I have some water?”

“Illy,” Elpida said.

Ilyusha screwed up her face. She took the tin mug and shoved it at Ooni so hard that water slopped into Ooni’s lap. Ooni didn’t care. She grabbed the cup and drained it in three gulps, then passed it back. Ilyusha’s tail hung in the air for a moment, as if she was considering ramming it through the delicate bones of Ooni’s face. But then she turned away and stomped the two paces back to Elpida’s side.

Elpida said: “Better?” Ooni nodded. “Good. Now, Illy, we need a scraper of some kind. A cauterization pen would be even better. Maybe we’ll need to ask Melyn if there’s a tool cabinet anywhere, for a blowtorch or something like that. Check that drawer, please?”

Ilyusha rummaged through the surgical equipment. Moments later she found some kind of hand-held cauterization wand, a self-powered surgical tool for closing wounds. Elpida thumbed the controls. The tip of the device glowed red-hot.

“Perfect,” Elpida said. “Now, Ooni, you have to watch this part. Illy, make sure she does.”

Slowly and methodically, Elpida drew the cauterization wand over the grinning skull on Ooni’s armour plate. The black paint burned away, crisping and flaking, emitting little curls of dark smoke. Tiny crackling sounds joined the static of the raindrops. The process took perhaps ten minutes. Nobody spoke. Elpida didn’t look up. Ilyusha sneered and grinned the whole time, watching Ooni closely. Ooni just watched the skull’s destruction.

She felt — nothing. She was following Elpida’s orders.

Eventually Elpida finished. She brushed away the remaining flakes of charred black. The paint was gone, but the outline of a skull was still visible against the grey.

Ilyusha spat: “Fucking shit fuck bitch—”

“Wait,” Elpida said. “Illy, do you still have those camo paint sticks?”

Ilyusha snorted, then fished around in her pockets and produced a stick of camo paint. Elpida drew a new symbol over the shadow of the skull: a crescent intersected by a line, the mark of the Wreckers and Murderers. Ooni tried very hard not to let disgust show on her face.

But then Elpida added a second line. She turned the symbol into a crescent intersected by a V-shape. Ilyusha tilted her head and frowned.

Elpida shrugged. She indicated the V-shape. “Telokopolis.” Then the crescent. “The world. Or maybe the sky. Or the green.”

Ilyusha said, “Doesn’t mean that.”

Elpida said, “What does it mean?”

“Mmmmm-rrrrr.” Ilyusha grumbled. “Complicated.”

“I’m just experimenting. I’ll have to think about it.” She raised her eyes to Ooni. “That’s the easy part over with. Now, Ooni. Do you have that skull mark tattooed anywhere on your body?”

Ooni felt the blood drain from her face. She stared at the cauterization wand in Elpida’s hand.

Here it came. The torture. Branding? She’d never been branded.

Ooni was no stranger to pain. She was pain’s unwilling intimate, pain’s favourite chew toy, pain’s bed-slave. She knew pain’s disgusting little nooks and crannies, pain’s peculiar desires and visceral dislikes, pain’s ends and means and insides and guts and brains. Having a piece of her skin burned off was nothing. She knew what it was like to get eaten alive, to wake up with the vultures’ snouts all buried in your own boiling intestines; she could recall the sensation of her head cracking open, consciousness still fluttering as predators plucked out her eyeballs and pulled out her tongue; a memory of being flayed floated to the surface of her mind. She couldn’t even recall when that had been. She broke out in cold sweat and struggled not to hyperventilate. Pain was coming once again; after six years with the Dead-Heads and freedom from pain, it had finally caught up with her.

She should have been used to this, should have been able to face it with ease, for Leuca’s sake.

She felt so weak.

Elpida smiled gently. She put down the cauterization tool. “Ooni, I’m not going to burn it off you. I’ll use a scalpel, a sharp one. I’m not trying to hurt you.”

They were going to flay her.

“Fuckin’ should,” Ilyusha spat. “Fucking tear it off her!”

Elpida said, “Illy, please. We have to do this right.”

Ilyusha snorted and crossed her arms. “Fuck you. Fuck you too, Elpi.”

Ooni hurried to obey. Her hands were shaking. Perhaps if she didn’t resist, they wouldn’t take too much of her; maybe she’d still be able to find a way out of this when all their backs were turned. She lifted the grey cloak from her shoulders and pulled up her t-shirt. She tried to ignore her own nudity; it didn’t matter, she had to submit as quickly as possible. She exposed her own tattoo: a tiny black skull, jawless, eyes blazing with jagged stars, high up on her left pectoral.

Ilyusha spat on the floor. Her bionic tail cut the air.

Elpida said, “That’s the only one?”

“I swear it,” Ooni replied. Her voice was shaking and she couldn’t stop. “I-I can strip if you want to verify.”

Elpida shook her head. “That’s not necessary. As long as it’s the only one.”

Ooni nodded.

Elpida said: “It’ll have to come off. Ooni, do you understand why?”

“Yes,” Ooni lied. “Please, I … I want you to … r-remove it. Yes.”

Elpida sighed. She saw right through the act, didn’t she? Her eyes weren’t even bionics. Perhaps Ooni’s mad assumption was correct — perhaps this woman really was born of a divine coupling.

Ooni didn’t care about the skull tattoo. The Dead-Heads were just another means to an end — a far more reliable means than any she had yet found, the only offering of hope she’d encountered since she’d lost Leuca, since the Fortress had fallen, since she’d learned that building anything in this afterlife was impossible. One brick could not be made to lie upon another. The Dead-Heads’ solution was the only way, and they kept the pain at bay, most of the time.

But Leuca had called her a traitor. So the skull had to come off.

Elpida was true to her word. Ilyusha offered to use her claws to cut off the offending symbol, but Elpida insisted on the scalpel — and on performing the excision herself. She gave Ooni a piece of gauze to bite down on, then loomed over her, metal scalpel held delicately in one hand. She used her other hand to press down on the skin, to make it taut and tight, easier to cut. Ooni bit down, turned her head, and screwed her eyes shut; perhaps the pain would come now, at the moment of willing surrender; perhaps Elpida would keep cutting — or perhaps she would leave the scalpel jammed into Ooni’s flesh, daring her to acknowledge the blade, let alone pull it out.

The operation was over in seconds. Ooni barely felt the knife. That scalpel really was as sharp as it looked.

Elpida pressed a piece of gauze against a wide, shallow wound just below Ooni’s collar bone. “Ooni. Ooni, look. Pay attention. Press down on the gauze. That’s right. Keep your hand there. Press tight. Good girl.”

Ooni blushed — good girl? She did as she was told; she was a good girl now. Blood soaked through the gauze and stained her fingertips. Elpida wrapped the gauze beneath a bandage, secured the bandage around Ooni’s shoulder, and said something about changing the dressing later on. Ooni spat out the piece of gauze she’d been biting down on, then automatically licked her own blood off her fingertips.

Elpida straightened up and stepped back — holding a piece of Ooni.

Elpida held the tiny flayed scrap of Ooni’s olive-brown skin between thumb and forefinger. The skull tattoo was pale now, no longer backed by flesh and blood. She held it up to the light — and popped it into her mouth.

Elpida chewed and swallowed quickly. Ilyusha looked a little confused, but didn’t complain. Amina seemed awestruck. Ooni was stunned.

Then Elpida offered Ooni the cannister of blue.

Ooni said: “I-I, uh, I don’t understand.”

“Gotta heal up that wound,” said Elpida. “One mouthful. If you’re one of us, then drink.”

Ooni’s hands shook as she raised the cannister to her lips. She hadn’t tasted raw blue in a very long time. She whimpered when the glowing life touched her tongue. She closed her eyes and swallowed a mouthful; she felt it sliding down her throat and filling her with warmth. It took all her self-control not to pour the whole cannister into herself; her body was screaming for more. When she lowered the cannister she found tears rolling down her cheeks. The terrible hunger was fading.

She didn’t understand. Why give her such precious resources? There was no way this group was really as fresh as Leuca believed — but this was pure naivety. None of this made any sense.

Ooni wiped her eyes. Don’t cry in front of a leader, it’s dangerous! What if that’s what she wants? Give you hope and kindness, then take it away.

Or maybe not. She’d cried in front of Yola — Yola had used that, yes, but she’d kept Ooni alive. Would Elpida do the same? Would she take pity?

Ooni knew she had to say something. “I— uh— t-thank you?”

“You’re welcome,” Elpida replied.

Ilyusha snorted. “Like you fucking deserved it, reptile fuck.”

Elpida sat back down on the infirmary bed. Her eyes lingered on Leuca for a moment, watching her breathe, roving over her many wounds. Leuca had sworn to Ooni that nothing had happened between her and Elpida, that they had not shared any intimacies; in fact, they’d resolved their differences with a fistfight. But Ooni saw the deep affection in Elpida’s eyes as she looked upon Leuca. Like they’d fucked. Or nearly fucked. Or wanted to fuck.

But Ooni’s jealousy had turned into wet ash.

“Alright,” Elpida said. She lifted her eyes from Leuca, and looked at Ooni. “That’s the outside dealt with. Now for the inside.” She indicated Ilyusha and Amina with a sideways nod. “I was going to ask these two to give us the room, so you and I could talk alone. But now I think that would be a bad idea.”

Ilyusha growled. “Not leaving her alone with you, Elpi.”

Elpida eyed Ilyusha, then nodded at the other fold-out metal seat. Ilyusha just shrugged and crossed her arms. Amina shook her head.

Ooni said: “May I … ?”

Elpida nodded. “Go ahead. You don’t have to ask permission to speak.”

“I … I’m not going to hurt anyone. I swear it, on Leuca’s life. I don’t want to hurt any of you, I just want … want to be … ”

She couldn’t finish the statement. Too many lies, all knotted up together. Too much kindness, when it made no sense, repaying her fist in Elpida’s gut with a gulp of raw blue. And Elpida saw through it all; those purple eyes burned through flesh and bone. She must truly be the daughter of a god.

Elpida took a deep breath and nodded. “I understand. Thank you, Ooni. Now, you and I are going to have a conversation.”

“Okay. Okay, sure! Yes! I-I’ll tell you anything you want.”

Ilyusha snorted. Elpida sighed, and said: “I don’t want you to be afraid of me, Ooni. I’m not going to hurt you, and I’m not going to hurt Pira. I promised you that, I—” Suddenly Elpida screwed up her eyes and flicked her head sideways. “Yes, yes, of course I meant it!”

Everyone stared at her: Amina looked awestruck again; Ilyusha seemed to understand, surprised but not shocked; Ooni didn’t know what to think. God-touched. God-stalked. Visions and voices. Why was she thinking these things again after all these years?

Because Leuca had told the truth — Elpida was special. But Leuca had not understood what she was speaking of.

Elpida opened her eyes again. “Sorry about that. Talking to the voices in my head, that’s all. Like I was saying, I promised not to hurt you or Pira. If you’re on our side, in good faith, then I won’t break that promise, no matter the mistakes you make.”

If you don’t fuck up; if you do what I say, when I say, how I say; if you offer up your flesh and soul to my cause instead of the Dead-Heads. Ooni knew the test must be coming soon, but what form would it take? A pound of flesh? No. Leuca had sworn off eating, and Leuca had so much faith in Elpida, so that made no sense. Something worse? Were they going to throw her back to Yola, as a spy? Or worse, so much worse; Ooni could imagine so much worse. The fresh wound on her chest itched beneath the dressing. The blood was beginning to clot.

Ooni tried to keep the fear off her face. She nodded. “Okay. Thank you, Commander.”

Elpida smiled. “You can just call me Elpida. Commander is fine, but you don’t have to do that all the time.”

“Elpida. Okay.”

Elpida said, “I need intel, whatever you can share. I gather that you’ve been around for a long time, like Pira, so anything you know might be useful to us — about the nanomachine ecosystem, or the tombs, or the graveworms, sources of nutrition, tricks we don’t know yet. Anything and everything. I also need to know about the Death’s Heads. I need to understand who they are and what they’ll do — how they might try to follow us or get revenge on us for escaping. And, more importantly than any of those things, I need to know who you are, Ooni. I need to know about you. I want to understand why you were with the Death’s Heads.”

Ooni wet her lips; she could do this. She could navigate this minefield. She had to, for Leuca. “Yes, Comm— Elpida.” She smiled.

“And, Ooni,” Elpida said. Rainstorm static filled the pause.

“Y-yes?”

“Don’t lie to me.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Don’t lie, Ooni. More than your reputation is riding on this. Zombies do terrible things, here in the ashes. Don’t pretend you didn’t.

Hoooooo gosh, this chapter was, uh, maybe the most challenging so far? Also the longest so far. This is nearly 6.7k words, and not on purpose. It just wouldn’t stop! I tried to find an end-point earlier, but that would have required an artificial cliffhanger, and I always try to avoid that. Ooni is a mess, possibly worse than anybody else in the cast so far. Her psychology here is … well, yeah, you’ve seen for yourself! Is her state entirely her fault? Not really. But she’s responsible for the decisions she took, the people she supported, and the ideology written on her flesh. Ooni is kind of a counterpoint to some of the Death’s Heads we met in arc 7; Yola and Cantrelle are ideologically committed true believers, while Ooni here is a fellow-traveler. She’s weak – but not for the reasons she thinks. She’s a coward, but not because she’s afraid of pain. Can Elpida make something better out of her? Maybe. Or maybe Ilyusha has a point. Seems like Elpida is going to try anyway.

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters ahead, or even more. I got a request for 5 chapters ahead, so I’m trying to see if I can somehow make that happen. Watch this space!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And thank you! Thank you so much for reading my little story. I know I say this every week, but I really mean it; I literally could not be doing this without all your support. You, the readers, you are the nanomachine wizardry that keeps Necroepilogos moving. Thank you! Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

>Request orders

Elpida stared at the glowing green words on the little black screen — one of dozens of readouts and displays which punctuated the jumbled surfaces and consoles of Pheiri’s control cockpit. She felt her brain filling up with rotten static. She prayed that the words would go away — that Pheiri would retract his offer of subservience, or his plea for direction, or whatever this was. She hoped that Pheiri would understand her refusal.

The text vanished.

Raindrops drummed on Pheiri’s exterior hull.

Elpida sighed with relief. She was not coherent enough to explain why she had refused, why she could not command this—

Green text reappeared.

>Request orders

Melyn was clinging to the back of Elpida’s seat. Her white-grey face peered over Elpida’s shoulder. She hissed: “Pheiri, stop it! She doesn’t want it anyway! Doesn’t want it anyway! Stop it! Stop! It! Stop! Stop— stop— errrk!”

Melyn squeaked as something yanked her backward. Elpida turned, careful to move slowly lest she twist her damaged stomach muscles and pop her stitches.

Hafina was lifting Melyn by her armpits, dragging her back like an angry kitten. Melyn flailed and kicked briefly; one small fist connected with the side of Elpida’s head and a foot glanced off Hafina’s meaty thigh. Atyle ducked out of the way. Hafina lowered Melyn’s feet back to the floor; the smaller artificial human just scowled and pouted and crossed her arms, frowning at Elpida.

Hafina ran one hand over Melyn’s head, stroking her glossy black hair. She purred: “Melyyyy, Melyyy. You’re still all turned around inside—”

“I know! I know!” Melyn snapped. “But I know this isn’t right! Isn’t right!”

Hafina said, “Pheiri always knows best. He keeps us safe, doesn’t he? Maybe he knows what he’s asking. Maybe we should—”

Melyn said: “We were doing fine by ourselves! By ourselves! Why do we need them? Need them?”

Elpida held up a hand — a gesture of surrender. She could not rally her thoughts through the black haze inside her head. She was so tired. She had done what she had intended — she had confirmed the safety of her cadre. No, her comrades, her friends, her— the others. Everyone was safe, even if the group was currently split. Her body said it was time to rest — but Pheiri had called her a ‘Telokopolan Officer’. Questions whirled in her mind. Her gut wound throbbed. She wanted to close her eyes.

But Melyn and Hafina were both deeply distressed. So was Pheiri.

Elpida croaked: “I’m not going to steal him from you, Melyn. I promise. Hafina, thank you, but Melyn can say what she likes, it’s okay.”

Melyn snorted, glaring daggers. Hafina just nodded her big, blonde, shaggy head and tried to smile. Atyle said nothing to help. The tall, dark revenant watched the exchange with a subtle smile on her lips.

Elpida turned back to the little black screen. She blinked hard, to clear her mind. The words were still there.

>Request orders

She said: “I’m sorry, Pheiri. I can’t command you. I can’t give you orders.”

A sleepy voice growled in the back of Elpida’s head: Why not, huh?

You know why, Howl.

The notion of ‘commanding’ a combat frame disgusted Elpida; pilots did not command their frames — they joined them in a physical partnership, human flesh wedded to artificial machine-meat, human thoughts blended with a piece of the city. The mind-machine interface uplink inserted the pilot into the combat frame’s own nervous system, like a missing piece to complete a circuit; the capsule enclosed the pilot as part of the frame’s own homeostatic processes, protected and cradled and fed like any other organ; decisions were made as a complete mind, not as director and actor, or master and servant, or driver and vehicle. There was no little voice whispering down the MMI uplink, no literal text printout behind a pilot’s eyes, the combat frame did not shout demands into the capsule in human language — but the subconscious feedback was undeniable. No pilot was alone inside a combat frame.

The Civitas and the public — and even the Legion — had often misunderstood what piloting a combat frame actually looked like; the pilot program had never released images to the public networks, for fear of undermining the fragile reputation of the pilots. The public might not respond positively to a real-time pict-capture of a young woman seemingly drowned in orange fluid, eyelids and extremities twitching in time with the machine-meat muscles of the frame. Not to mention the wet-rat aftermath, the vomiting, the shakes, the non-verbal episodes, the dissociative states; none of that was very photogenic.

Official Civitas communication materials had always depicted the pilots as upright and proud, sitting in shiny chrome seats, wearing helmets and uplink glasses and bead-mics, like the drivers of Legion crawlers. They’d never used the pilot cadre’s real phenotype — the purple eyes and copper-brown skin and white hair. The Civitas wanted their pilots to represent all humanity, not an engineered offshoot.

Entertainment media had run with that, at least during the good years before the Covenanters grew in number: the fictional pilots for public consumption had full names, families, marriages, parents, sometimes even children; they had varying childhoods of their own, or sympathetic backgrounds, or tearful secrets in their pasts; they had careers before piloting, sometimes Legion, sometimes civilian, sometimes plucky girls from the Skirts. Henny’s Heroines, The Steadfast Six, Dark Edge of Night — Elpida hated all the titles. She’d never paid much attention; the fictional drama seemed so much smaller than reality. Some of her sisters found the public shows hilarious — Snow, Yeva, Emi, and Shade made Henny’s Heroines into a regular group watch-along, complete with jeering, shouting, and throwing things at the screen.

At least that was better than the way the Covenanters had depicted them.

But even the pilot program and the bone-speakers had not understood the subconscious connection between pilot and frame — or perhaps they had not believed. Even Old Lady Nunnus had spoken of the combat frames like machines to be driven.

Elpida glanced around Pheiri’s control cockpit.

He did not look anything like the inside of a combat frame, not even a manual control chamber — no crimson and scarlet machine-meat light throbbing behind walls of smooth white bone. He didn’t look like the inside of a Legion crawler either; Pheiri was much more complicated than the simple layout of driver, gunner, and commander, and much bigger than even the largest. Over a dozen seats were crammed into this jumbled space; a web of control systems crawled up the walls and across the ceiling, in a network of panels and switches and headsets and levers and readouts and displays. Elpida could guess at the nature of some systems — such as the literal driver’s seat right at the front, complete with dozens of levers and a headset uplink for external cameras — but most were totally opaque to her, products of technology she had never witnessed in life.

Pheiri had also been retrofitted multiple times; some of the oldest, most well-worn consoles and chairs looked more ergonomic or expensive, and others seemed blockier or more simplistic, as if added later, in greater haste, with less resources. Loose cables were stapled to the walls in haphazard snakes; auxiliary screens were screwed directly over obsolete controls; whole banks of switches and buttons lay dark, disconnected from non-existent systems.

And then there was that MMI uplink helmet, up in the turret, back in the corridor.

That was an anachronism; the Legion had attempted to use those back before the pilot program, before the cadre had been conceived in their uterine replicators. An attempt to control the earliest of the combat frames. Those experiments had failed. The Legion ‘pilots’ had not survived the experience, though some of their bodies had lingered on life-support for decades.

An uplink helmet, a blunt instrument. Elpida had used one before, when the program had first trained her and her sisters. The connection would be crude, nothing like a main trunk into an uplink slot wired into her spinal column. Elpida let that one lie for now — she didn’t want to upset Melyn again by talking about the helmet. It wasn’t as if she would be able to climb that ladder with her gut wound, anyway.

He’s a combat frame, Elpida thought. He may not look like one, but he is. I’m not going to take advantage of him, Howl. I’m not a fucking Covenanter.

Mm, Howl grunted. She still sounded half-asleep. Sure thing, Elps. But that ain’t what you said.

What?

You said you can’t command him ‘cos you keep getting everyone killed. Stop twisting yourself in circles, bitch. You’re gonna get dizzy and throw up.

Elpida gritted her teeth and put her face in one hand. “Shut up, Howl.”

“Warrior?”

Elpida looked up at Atyle. Her dark face was framed against the gunmetal and cream-white of Pheiri’s interior. Her peat-green bionic eye flexed and twisted. Elpida blinked several times to clear her clouded vision, and said: “Sorry. Just talking to the voices in my head.”

Atyle said: “It is wise to take counsel. But, warrior, you wish to answer the titan’s needs, do you not? What he needs is within your power to grant. Why reject his fealty?”

Elpida frowned. “Because I have no right. And because I’m not a good Commander.”

Atyle shrugged. “Perhaps the titan cares not.”

Elpida looked at the little screen again.

>Request orders

Behind her, Melyn whined, low and pitiful and angry. Raindrops drummed on Pheiri’s exterior armour. His engines throbbed and pulsed beneath the deck. Green text glowed. The cockpit clicked and hummed. Elpida’s mind felt slow and thick. Her words felt clumsy. She was half-naked, with a ruined t-shirt draped over her shoulders and her gut wrapped up tight with bandages. She wanted to go back to sleep, but she couldn’t.

She was the Commander.

“Pheiri,” Elpida started. “Pheiri, I don’t even really comprehend what you are, not yet. I would like to, though. I have so many questions, I—”

Stay on target, Elps, Howl grumbled.

Elpida took a deep breath. Her heart lurched with anticipation. “Let’s start with some basic information. I need you to answer a question for me. Your text, on the screen, referred to me as a ‘Telokopolan Officer’. Do you know what Telokopolis is? You’re wearing Telokopolan armour. Did you come from Telokopolis?”

The request for orders was replaced by a block of text.

>
Military Order No.76344: Recovery of Telokopolan technology, artefacts, intelligence, and stasis-preserved personnel.

The enemy is not invincible. Afon Ddu still stands, our walls unbreached, our perimeter secure, our people safe, our industry and agriculture productive, our arms strengthened and our armour toughened. A nanomachine plague has been stopped before and it will be stopped again, history is clear on this matter, all theories to the contrary are nothing more than idle speculation and defeatism. Telokopolis, the corpse-shell-seed of our great ancestor and mother, lies far to the east, far beyond the reach of our forces, but her technology and techniques do not. Recovery of Telokopolan ingenuity has already led to improvements in every area of warfare. The enemy is not invincible. Our ancestors did this once before, and so shall we.

The Afon Ddu General Command Council hereby orders all fronts and front commanders to:

1: Prioritize archaeological operations wherever possible.
2: Forbid retreat from archaeological sites.
3: Report all finds directly to the General Command Council without delay.
4: Follow up on any and all rumours of stasis-preserved Telokopolan personnel.
>

Elpida read the order several times. Rain drummed on the hull.

“We were … ” she croaked eventually. “We were archaeology, to you? We were your … ancestors? I … I don’t … we beat the green? The Covenanters beat the green? I don’t—”

The screen cleared. Fresh text appeared.

>
///Encyclopaedia entry define: ‘Covenanter’
///ERROR entry corrupt
///elevate permission control
///input Human-Human mastergene code access
///permission control overridden 99999999 ERROR hours previous: authorization Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren

‘Covenanter’, Telokopolan, mid-era, evidence speculative: believed to a short-lived apocalypse cult during the Mid-T period.

///entry corrupt
///entry ends
>

Elpida laughed. Then she coughed. Her gut wound burned like a chunk of hot steel in her belly. Her head throbbed.

“Short lived? I-I don’t … I can’t— I can’t deal with this.” She ran a hand over her face; she could deal with this, her mind was already catching up, ignoring stressors and working on solutions. “Okay, what was Afon Ddu? Was that your—”

“Home?” said a tiny voice.

Elpida turned in her seat. Melyn was staring at the words on the screen, her huge black eyes blank with confusion. She mouthed the word again, ‘home’. Haf focused on stroking Melyn’s hair.

Elpida turned back to the screen. “So, you were searching for Telokopolis, too? Your whole society was. And you failed? Afon Ddu, I assume it’s gone now, like everything else?”

Another screen lit up down by Elpida’s elbow. The black background filled with boxes and lines in red and grey: a pyramid-shaped graph with rot around the edges.

Elpida peered closer. “Is this your order of battle?”

A box labelled ‘Civil Control’ stood at the apex of the pyramid; a single line led downward to box labelled ‘Afon Ddu General Command Council’. Both boxes were red; the line between them was severed. From the Command Council the hierarchy spread out into a wide pyramid of army groups, themata, divisions, droungos, specialist formations, armoured spears, foederati, even forts and factories directly integrated into the military command structure. Some of the terminology made sense to Elpida — Telokopolan military words in the places she expected them to be. But some it was strange to her — words from Upper-Spire or Skirts dialects pressed into new uses.

Most of the boxes were red. Some were grey, labelled with question marks. All the lines were cut.

At the very base of the pyramid, surrounded by red on all sides, was a single box glowing in gold-green.

‘Pheiriant. Arfog ymladd cerbyd Mod.47.2 ‘Tortoise’’

Pheiri’s own OOB marker had been expanded to show the contents. A list of eight names glowed in sombre red — Cerys, Talieson, Ffion, and more. To Elpida those names seemed similar to the language in which Melyn had spoken, before the nanomachine translation had caught up. Similar to Melyn, or Hafina. Not Telokopolan names.

Pheiri’s human crew? All dead?

Below the human names were two additional categories: ‘on-board synthetic assistants’, and ‘deployable autonomous infantry’. Both categories held a list of serial numbers. All the numbers were red — except for two, one each category. Those two serial numbers had been crossed out and replaced with a pair of names in gold-green: ‘Melyn’ and ‘Hafina’.

Elpida stared for a long time. Tears prickled in her eyes.

“Thank you for the answer,” she said eventually. She reached out and pressed a palm against the panel in front of her. It was cold and hard. “I know. My home’s gone too. My sisters are all dead. I’m sorry.”

Elpida wiped her eyes and looked up at the others. Atyle appeared unmoved. Melyn and Hafina were both staring at the ORBAT chart as if they didn’t quite understand what they were looking at. Melyn was frowning, her smooth, white-grey little face scrunched up with the effort of comprehension.

Pheiri’s last remaining family.

Elpida turned back to the little black screen. It was empty now.

“How long have you been out here?” she asked.

>99999999 ERROR hours

“Right.” Elpida took a deep breath. “Okay. Thank you for answering, Pheiri. I get it. I really do. No command, no direction. Home’s gone. Maybe you weren’t designed to be autonomous. Maybe you’ve been running by yourself for too long, looking after Melyn and Hafina. I can be your ally, I can be your friend. But I can’t command you. I can’t give you orders. I’ve got no right. You’ve survived so much longer than I have, out here, in this. I and my friends, my comrades, I think we’d probably be dead if not for your support back there. If anything, you should be commanding me, you have more expertise than me. I can be your ally, but I can’t be your Comman—”

“Why not?!” Melyn spat.

Elpida turned in surprise. Pain shot through her stomach, stitches tugging at flesh beneath the dressing. She winced hard and lost her breath.

Melyn had pulled herself out of Haf’s grip and stepped forward again. Her many-fingered hands were bunched into fists. Her big black eyes were shiny with tears. With Elpida sitting down and Melyn standing they were almost level with each other. Melyn’s white-grey face was screwed up with offended fury.

“Melyyy, Melyyyyy!” Haf was saying — but she did not move forward to restrain her partner.

“Melyn?” Elpida wheezed. “Speak your mind.”

“Why not?” Melyn repeated. “You say you’re our Commander. Me and Haf. Me and Haf. But not Pheiri? Not Pheiri? Me and Haf but not Pheiri? You won’t give him— give him— give him—” Melyn thumped her own chest with a bloody hand — Elpida’s blood, Pira’s blood — then coughed and wheezed. Haf moved to catch her; so did Elpida, despite the pain in her stomach. But Melyn waved them away, hands flapping with anger. “If you won’t— won’t— won’t help Pheiri, then you’re right! You’re right. You’re right. You’re a bad Commander. Bad Commander. Shitty Commander!”

Melyn straightened up, tears in her eyes. Haf winced slowly, as if she expected Elpida to slap Melyn.

Elpida eased back into her chair. She took deep breaths as the pain in her gut wound subsided back to a smouldering ember. “Melyn, I thought you didn’t— like the idea— of me being— your Commander?”

“I don’t!” Melyn spat. “But it’s not fair! Pheiri is alone! Alone! We’re all alone.”

Hafina was trying to hush her: “Shhhh! Shhhhhhh!”

In the back of Elpida’s mind, Howl grumbled: She’s got a point, Elps. No sister left behind. What if this stonking great crawler-frame thing was the size of Melyn, begging for your protection, huh? Would you say no, then? Come on, bitch. Be consistent.

Elpida raised her voice: “You’re not alone. Melyn, Hafina, you’re not alone.”

They both looked at her.

Elpida turned back to the little black screen. She took a deep breath. “Pheiri, your society did not end in failure. You found Telokopolis. You found me. In a way—” Elpida’s throat grew thick, but she pushed past it. “In a way you’re a child of the city too, just a fair bit younger than me. Does that make you my little brother?” She almost laughed. Her head was full of static. “I’ve had a lot of sisters, but never a brother. That makes Melyn and Hafina descendants of Telokopolis, too.” She filled her lungs and closed her eyes. “As long as one of us is still up and breathing, the city stands. Telokopolis is forever.”

She opened her eyes.

>99999999 ERROR hours

Elpida almost laughed. “That’s forever? Good enough, little brother.”

The text refreshed.

>Request orders

“Alright, Pheiri,” Elpida croaked. “I … I’ll be your Commander, too. But I can’t just give you orders. This has to be an agreement. You and I have to agree. You have the right to question me. You understand?”

>
[[[.designate non-authority advisory role]]]
>

Elpida said: “Okay. Advisory? We can start there, we can work with that. I can advise you.”

>
///Commander
>

Elpida sighed, but she couldn’t help the smile. “Sure. Call me Commander, if you want. The others mostly do.”

She looked back at Melyn and Hafina. Melyn still did not look happy, arms folded, brow furrowed; but she regarded Elpida with less hostility. Hafina grinned a big, goofy, sheepish grin. Atyle just smiled, thin and inscrutable.

Elpida closed her eyes.

Her body still demanded rest — or food. The great and terrible hunger for fresh meat was beginning to gnaw at her entrails again. The implications of Pheiri’s origins had left her stunned, even as her trained and engineered mind kept up with ease. She had so many tasks ahead of her — not least the looming conversation with Pira and Ooni.

At least she and the others were safe inside Pheiri, inside a little recovered offshoot of Telokopolis, a fellow child of the city.

Melyn muttered: “Is she sleeping?”

Atyle replied in a whisper, “Perhaps. She is very damaged, little maid.”

“Why do you call me that? Call me that?”

“Because it is what you are. The titan’s maid. It is a beautiful thing, to attend a god.”

Haf agreed: “Melyn is pretty.”

Melyn hissed through her teeth.

Safe, protected — but Elpida was in command, and two of her girls were still beyond the safety of these walls. Vicky and Kagami were still inside that fallen combat frame in the middle of the crater — disunited, cut off behind enemy lines, out in the green.

She could not afford to rest.

Elpida opened her eyes and looked at Atyle. “Our first order of business is to link back up with Kagami and Vicky. Then we need to see if there’s a way to contact Serin. She might not be one of us, but she helped us, that matters. I need to speak with Vicky and Kagami first. What are the communication systems here like?”

Atyle tilted her head. “I told you once, warrior. Rest or die.”

Melyn snapped: “Hey!”

Elpida tried to laugh; the snort made her stomach hurt. “Melyn, it’s okay. That was just Atyle, not a threat.”

Atyle said, “I am neither a wound nor weariness. I do not speak with their voices.”

Elpida sighed. “I can plan while I rest, or send others to solve the problem. I want to speak with them, to see how they’re doing, and figure out how we’re going to get them back over here.”

Atyle raised her eyebrows.

Howl snorted: Bitch is lying.

Elpida said, “You’re concealing something from me, aren’t you?”

Atyle grinned. “The warrior sees almost as much as I do. Yes, I—”

“Are Kaga and Vicky safe?”

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t care. How do I talk to them?”

Atyle gestured at the many control panels and internal systems of Pheiri’s cockpit. “We must use the titan himself. His shell is too thick for stray messages.”

Elpida nodded. “Pheiri, how do I—”

A speaker crackled to life on the other side of the control cockpit.

“Elpi? Hey! Hey, Elpi, is that you?”

Full of static and interference, tinny and broken, almost drowned out by the rainstorm washing the hull — but unmistakable.

Elpida croaked: “Vicky. Can you hear me?”

Vicky laughed, muffled and distant. “Yeah! Yeah, loud and clear, Elpi!” Melyn darted across the compartment and twisted several dials near the speaker grille; when Vicky spoke again, her voice was clear: “Ahhh shit. Elpi, it’s good to know you’re alright.”

Atyle murmured, “Or the titan could contact them for us.”

Elpida raised her voice as firmly as she could, in case the connection really was as bad as it sounded: “I’m doing fine, Vicky. Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix. Everyone else is okay, too. We’re all in one piece, with some new friends.”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard. Atyle told us. Look, I—”

“Commander!” another voice snapped through the speaker — rough and scratchy with stress and lack of sleep, dripping with sarcasm. Melyn flinched. “Elpida. ‘Commander’.”

“Kagami,” Elpida said. “It’s good to hear your voice too.”

Kagami said, “Don’t fuck with me. I have a bone to pick with you, ‘Commander’. You fucking madwoman, you—”

A rustle interrupted — was Vicky trying to hush Kagami? Vicky said: “Kaga, Kaga, hey, cool down, she doesn’t need that. Okay? We made it, we—”

“Oh, really?” Kagami spat. “She doesn’t need it, does she? Our omni-benevolent Commander doesn’t need any fucking critique to stop her from recruiting random fascists!? You’re going to sit there and tell me you’re alright with that?” Kagami’s voice suddenly cleared, as if she had leaned closer to the microphone. “She’s not okay with it, by the way, in case you were wondering. Your obedient little private here is practically contemplating mutiny, ‘Commander’”

Vicky stammered. “K-Kaga, hey, hey, stop—”

Kagami kept going. “She ranted for over an hour about how you should have put a bullet in that woman’s head. And for the record, I agree with her! Pira, too! Shoot the both of them and have done with it!”

Vicky spoke over Kagami: “And I changed my mind! Elpi, she’s shit-stirring. I’m sorry—”

Kagami shouted, “Yes, only because you have a fucking head wound!”

Elpida couldn’t keep the smile off her face. It was just like listening to her cadre. Only they weren’t in arm’s reach for her to discipline.

“Kagami,” Elpida said before one of them could snap again. “Kagami, I am thoroughly deserving of criticism, believe me, I know that very well. Recruiting Ooni may be a mistake. I haven’t decided yet. I haven’t had time to sit down and figure out who she really is. It was a poor decision, I was impaired.”

“Right! Yes!” Kagami snapped. “So you’re going to—”

“But I would do it again,” Elpida said. “And nobody is putting anything in her or Pira — bullets or otherwise. They are both under my protection, for now. Ooni took my deal, she upheld her end of that by trying to kill Yola. And Pira proved her good faith, if not her good judgement.” Elpida pulled the ruined t-shirt off her shoulders and spread it out on her lap, staring at the crescent-and-line symbol she’d daubed in her own blood; she really needed to talk to Serin about this, about what it meant. Or maybe Ilyusha. “I’m Commander to those two as well.”

Kagami clenched her teeth so hard that the microphone picked up the sound.

Elpida said: “Kagami—”

“If you’re going to tell me not to shoot both her and Pira, you can shove your—”

“Thank you.”

Silence.

Elpida carried on: “Thank you, Kagami. I’m not sure we would have made it out of the skyscraper without you acting as mission control. You did incredibly well. Good job. I’m proud of you. I’m proud you’re one of us.”

“ … s-shut up, Elpida,” Kagami hissed. “Fuck’s sake.”

“Now,” Elpida said. “How are you both holding up? Vicky, you have a head wound?”

“Ehhhhh,” Vicky grunted. “Not great, but not terrible? The head wound sucks, I have a broken skull. Makes it hard to focus? And it’s … healing slowly.”

Kagami snorted. “She’s fine, she’s just bellyaching.”

“And I’m hungry. Starving, really. We both are.” Vicky sounded less happy when she said that. Kagami just grunted, unwilling to contradict Vicky’s appetite.

Elpida said, “The inside of a combat frame is airtight. Atmospherically sealed. That thing came from orbit, so that must still be true.”

Kagami said, “So?”

“Oh,” said Vicky. “Oh, shiiiit. Yeah, we’re locked up tight.”

Kagami sighed. “We can open the hatch, you moron. I can open it from here! I’m not going to, because something might come in and eat us.”

Elpida said, “You’re both cut off from ambient nanomachines in the air.”

Kagami clucked her tongue. “Assuming that wasn’t another lie from Pira.”

“Noted,” Elpida said. “I don’t think she had any reason to mislead us about the basic mechanics of nanomachine biology. Everything we’ve seen so far does line up with what she said, Serin too. But Pira did conceal other information, so I’m open to alternative suggestions. For now, I’m going to work on the assumption that you two are slowly starving. You can’t stay in there forever.”

“Y-yeah,” Vicky said. “I agree with Elpi.”

Kagami just grunted.

Elpida sighed, closed her eyes, and let her head roll back against the control cockpit chair. Her gut wound burned beneath the clean dressing. She said: “We really need short range comms. If you two left there now and headed toward us, we’d have no way of knowing if something went wrong, let alone linking back up with you. We’re gonna have to come pick you up, one way or the other. Either in Pheiri, or on foot, or … ” Elpida frowned, trying to push through the black haze. “I suppose Hafina could go pick you up, stay in stealth, get back here?”

Melyn said: “Haf stays home. Stays home!”

Hafina let out a deep, plaintive purr.

Vicky said, “Elpi, you don’t wanna come and see for yourself?”

Elpida felt a sad smile crease her lips. “The combat frame isn’t up and walking, so I’m guessing you haven’t had much luck. In fact, I’m guessing she’s mortally wounded, and we don’t have the drydock or repair facilities to heal her. You can tell me everything, I’m listening. I do want to know what you’ve found in there. Maybe there are things I should see for myself, but … I feel like I’ve abandoned hope for that. I know you two brought down the Necromancer, Atyle told me. I want to know all about that, anything she said. She was wearing my face, right?”

Silence. Elpida opened her eyes.

“Vicky? Kagami?”

“Elpi,” Vicky said slowly. “You just want us to leave?”

Elpida sighed. “Not really. I want to wake that combat frame and see it walk. But if it’s not moving under its own power by now … ”

Kagami snapped: “What about the pilot? You want us to leave her?”

Elpida’s heart lurched. She sat bolt upright in her seat, then clutched her stomach as the motion provoked a wave of pain. “There’s a pilot? A living pilot? Is she— does she have my phenotype?”

Vicky said: “Atyle didn’t tell you?”

Atyle smiled, dark and clever. “I was attempting to coax the warrior back to bed. It seems I have failed.”

“Tell me about the pilot!” Elpida demanded. She was shaking. “Does she—

Kagami snapped out an answer: “She has the same looks as you, yes, Commander. Purple eyes, white hair, brown skin. Weird looks, I’m not going to sugar coat that. You both look weird as all fuck. And before you get your hopes up — no, her name is not one of the ones you keep muttering like a prayer. Yes, we’ve all heard you doing that. This pilot doesn’t even have a name, she has a serial number—”

Elpida’s heart lurched the other way; a pilot, with cadre phenotype, but not one of her sisters?

Still one of us, said Howl.

“—and she’s alive, yes,” Kagami finished. “Alive for now, anyway.”

“What do you mean? Explain. Is she wounded?”

“Yes,” Kagami said. “But we can’t figure out where. There’s blood in her weird orange piss-tank. And we can’t take her out of that. We don’t even dare open the thing, because she’s a real human being.”

Elpida’s blood went cold. “She’s not a zombie? The air, the atmosphere, the … everything. Even us.”

“Yup,” Kagami grunted. “Homo sapiens, original flavour, ready to decant. The nanomachines will eat her alive.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Good enough, little brother. Good enough. You’re not doing this alone anymore.

Elpida needs to rest! Holy shit, she’s still going, exhausted beyond thought and carrying that stomach wound. This new development is going to make her want to act, now, but she can’t. Even if she put all the pieces in place, she can’t lead if she can’t keep her eyes open. Perhaps time to deal with the prep work first? On that note, gosh, this arc is shaping up nicely and it’ll probably be quite a bit longer, at least another 2-3 chapters, likely even more! And there’s some surprises coming up shortly.

No patreon link this week! It’s almost the end of the month and I never like the risk of double charging anyway. Feel free to wait until the 1st if you do want to subscribe, the advance chapter will be there if you do.

In the meantime there’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And thank you! I know I say this every week, but I am very grateful that so many of you enjoy reading Necroepilogos. I am still having an incredible time writing this, and I hope you are enjoying the story as much as I am. Until next chapter, dear readers! When once again we return to the inside of Pheiri’s hull, perhaps to catch up with somebody else.

Content Warnings

Memory issues/degenerative diseases
Linguistic processing disabilities

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Melyn’s home was full of zombies. She didn’t know how to feel about that; at least they weren’t trying to eat her.

Home — that was a difficult word, one she had not used in a long time. Whenever she and Haf ventured beyond Pheiri’s hull — up to the outer deck, or out on one of the few excursions that she could recall — she would say things like ‘we should return’, or ‘time to get inside’, or ‘I want to go back to Pheiri’. Never ‘let’s go home’. 

But Pheiri was home. The events of the last twelve hours had clarified that definition.

Haf had gone beyond Pheiri’s hull to help the friendly zombies fight other zombies; Melyn wasn’t very useful in a fight even when she wasn’t feeling so unwell and confused — she could hold a small gun, point it in the right direction, and pull the trigger, but little more than that. So, Haf and the first of the friendly zombies had left her behind, swaddled in blankets in Pheiri’s control cockpit, half-blind, drooling, singing snippets of poetry to Pheiri. Haf hadn’t wanted to go; Haf had pretended that nothing was wrong. But Melyn knew what it meant when Haf put on all the pieces of her armour; even scrambled up and shivering, Melyn knew. Haf had kissed her on the forehead and said she’d be back soon. Then Melyn had been alone, without Hafina for the first time in longer than her notebooks recorded.

Minutes had crawled into hours — two hours, then more. Pheiri had waited with most of his insides dark and quiet; Melyn knew that Pheiri was repairing the parts of himself that protected them. Melyn’s mind had started to unscramble. She’d stopped singing poetry — she had no idea where the poems had come from.

But then she’d gotten scared.

What if Haf got hurt? What if Haf got overwhelmed by the zombies? What if the zombies ate her? Zombies were different this close to a worm — they were smaller, more numerous, a little bit less dangerous, and apparently they weren’t all bad. Melyn had not expected Pheiri to let a zombie inside. But then the zombie had spoken like a person, so she was okay.

But other zombies weren’t so friendly. What if Hafina never came back?

Melyn had started to say all sorts of things to Pheiri. Some of them she wasn’t proud of. Most of them didn’t make sense. Her mind was still very jumbled and she couldn’t make the words stay put in the right order. But eventually she had settled on a phrase that felt correct:

“What if Haf doesn’t come — home?”

Home.

That word had generated a string of complaints upon the screen of her mind, all about ‘designated charging cradles’, ‘assigned divisional quarters’, and ‘medical corps assistant storage’. That was useless, so she made it all go away. Then her mind had filled with other nonsense about ‘home’ being breached, overrun, and abandoned. Home did not exist. Home was gone.

But Pheiri was here. Pheiri was safe. Pheiri was home. She made all the other stuff go away.

Then Pheiri had done a lot of shouting and running about; Melyn had strapped herself into one of the seats. Haf had returned with half a dozen zombies — two of which were very badly wounded and about to die. Melyn had not seen the point in saving dying zombies. Wouldn’t they just come back anyway? She’d stood in the rear airlock door, overwhelmed by the shouting, by Pheiri throwing them all about again, by the blood all over the floors, by zombies screeching at each other, crying, clawing, and—

And the screen of Melyn’s mind had filled with clear instructions.

She’d opened the infirmary; she’d remembered the scalpels and stitches and staples, and how to use them. She’d followed the screen of her mind, cleaning and cutting and clamping, gluing and stitching and bandaging, working for hours until she and the floor were coated with blood. She had made a lot of mistakes — her instructions were clear but the screen of her mind was broken and incomplete; she knew that now, she knew she was filling in the gaps with guesses and experiments. She made so many mistakes that a human being would have died under her knife. But these two were not human beings, they were zombies. She made them live.

And now they were all over Pheiri’s insides: resting in the infirmary, sleeping in the bunk room, talking to yet more zombies over the airwaves. The presence of all these outsiders had finally clarified the truth: Pheiri was home. Her home. She loved her home.

But home was changing.

And this zombie — Elpida — called herself ‘Commander’.

The screen of Melyn’s mind suggested several alternative designations for Elpida: ‘nanomachine conglomeration’, ‘level nine XZ military threat’, ‘compromised network output node’, ‘officer class leadership priority engagement’ — along with several others that made no sense to Melyn, like ‘zed-head’, ‘necro-fuck’, and ‘deadite’. All those suggestions had cleared away when Elpida had called herself ‘Commander’.

Elpida needed Melyn’s help to stand up from the infirmary bed. She needed Melyn’s help to step over the small, blonde, angry zombie — Ilyusha? Funny name — who was sleeping all untidy in the doorway. She needed Melyn’s help to step out into the crew compartment. The Commander needed a lot of help with everything. Was that what Commanders did? At least she didn’t complain about Melyn smearing more blood all over her arm and hip.

“Thank you,” Elpida croaked. “Thank you, Melyn.”

The crew compartment ceiling was much higher; Elpida straightened up.

Melyn watched Elpida’s strange purple eyes rove over the crew compartment. She looked at the benches, the blankets, Haf’s equipment, their various clothes, a couple of half-eaten nutrient blocks; Elpida’s eyes paused with special interest on the books — Melyn’s notebooks, and her other books. Then Elpida looked upward, at the  ladders which led to the storage racks, and the diagonal passage on the left which led to the top hatch airlock. Then she returned to the most important thing in the compartment — Hafina.

Haf was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, naked except for her loose underwear. She was bent over the disassembled parts of her biggest gun, the one Melyn couldn’t lift, busy rubbing grease into the components. She returned Elpida’s curious stare with a big goofy grin.

Melyn looked back and forth: Elpida was tall, but Hafina was taller; Elpida had that long snowy white hair — but Haf’s hair was golden, and fluffier; Elpida’s skin was a rich pale copper-brown, but she had nothing on Hafina’s shifting colours; Elpida’s muscles were exposed because she wasn’t wearing a shirt, but Haf had more muscles and she was more naked; Elpida’s purple eyes were interesting, but Haf’s big black orbs were better, just like Melyn’s eyes; Elpida had big breasts, Haf’s were larger (Melyn wasn’t sure why that mattered to her, but it did). Elpida was pretty, but nowhere near as pretty as Hafina. Melyn decided not to say any of this out loud, because it would make Haf insufferable for weeks.

“Melyyyyyyy,” Hafina purred. “Does she understand you yet? Hey there, big girl. Can you tell what I’m saying now?”

Melyn tutted. “She can understand us fine. Understand us fine. Shut up, Haf, don’t be silly. Be silly. And she’s not big, she’s smaller than you. Smaller than you.”

Elpida cleared her throat. “Haf — Hafina? I apologise for staring. You look very different without your armour.”

Haf let out a big rumble, the sort of purr she made when she felt smug. She stretched her top two arms upward to touch the ceiling of the crew compartment, while rolling the others forward to make her back muscles ripple.

Melyn huffed and rolled her eyes and wanted to poke Haf in the side. But she couldn’t do that because Elpida might fall over without her support.

Instead Melyn snapped: “Haf. Stop showing off.”

Haf purred again.

Elpida made a funny pose — she tucked her right arm halfway over her chest and bowed her head to Haf. “Thank you, Hafina, for your help in getting out of there. We wouldn’t have held off the Death’s Heads without you. Thank you for saving me and my comrades.”

Haf grinned even wider, ducking her head and looking away, being all big and stupid for Elpida; Melyn really didn’t like that. It made her chest feel wrong.

Haf said: “Been a long time since I did a big fight. Got a bit dunted? Dunted? Dunt-ed?”

“Dented,” Melyn corrected. “Wear more armour next time. You’re so stupid, Haf. So stupid. You should have taken the shield. The shield.”

Hafina raised four hands and wiggled her grease-coated fingers. “Needed more hands for more guns. Don’t tell me how to shoot, Melyyyy. You don’t know how to shoot.” Hafina purred and grinned, like she always did when teasing. But Melyn didn’t want her to tease in front of Elpida.

Melyn snapped again, “Just because I can’t doesn’t mean I don’t know how. Don’t know how. Don’t know how. Don’t know— don’t— don’t—”

Her words refused to line up; her mind felt scrambled all over again. Melyn hissed with frustration and thumped herself in the chest.

That wiped the grin off Haf’s face. She sat up straight, eyes going wide. “Mely! Mely, you’re still worn out and tired and not all there. Go slow, Mely. Go slow, slow. Okay? Be gentle with yourself.”

That made Melyn feel even worse. She couldn’t look at Haf’s face. This was all going wrong — and it was all the zombie’s fault.

Elpida said: “Everyone has something to contribute, even if you can’t fight. There’s no shame in that. Thank you again, both of you, for helping us. I don’t yet understand why, but—”

Melyn said to Haf: “She says she’s our Commander.”

The screen of Melyn’s mind liked that designation, ‘Commander’. Melyn made it go away.

Hafina squinted. “She’s what?”

“Our Commander.”

Hafina squinted the other way. “No she’s not.”

“She’s not. She’s not,” Melyn agreed. That felt much better.

Hafina closed one eye. “But she did save the other one.”

“The other one? The other one?”

“Pira,” Haf said. “Or … Leuca. They kept calling her both. The zombie that helped protect Pheiri. So, if she’s their Commander, and she commanded them to protect Pheiri—”

“That’s not how it works, Haf,” Melyn said. “Not how it works. Not how it works. Works.”

Elpida cleared her throat again, and said: “Excuse me, may I clarify something?”

Melyn tried to say ‘you may’ — but the screen of her mind stopped her with that designation again: ‘Commander’, the same way it had stopped her when she’d tried to tell Elpida to stay put and rest in the infirmary. She couldn’t say the words. She couldn’t say what she wanted. She couldn’t say no.

Melyn hissed with frustration and deleted the entry for ‘Commander’. She replaced it with one of the other suggestion: ‘necro-fuck’.

Then she said to Elpida: “You may not.”

Elpida smiled awkwardly. “Okay then.”

Melyn felt much better now. She corrected herself: “I mean you may. You may.”

Elpida said, “Thank you. Um, I should probably apologise. When I called myself Commander I didn’t mean to claim any authority over either of you two. I’ve done nothing to prove myself to you, except stagger into your home and bleed all over your floor. I’m … Commander, sort of, to the others, but when I called myself your Commander, I was trying to … to commit to return the same protection and hospitality that you have extended to us.” Elpida squeezed her eyes shut for a second, as if somebody was speaking to her and making bad suggestions; did she have an irritating problem with the screen of her mind, just like Melyn did? Elpida said: “I was treating you like my … sisters … my cadre, when I should be treating you like the Legion. Allies. Important. Not mine.” She opened her eyes and blinked several times. Such bright purple. “You choose your own leaders. Pheiri — he’s your leader, is that correct?”

Melyn deleted the ‘necro-fuck’ entry and replaced it with Elpida’s name. But then she added (zombie), in brackets.

“Pheiri protects us,” she said.

Haf said to the ceiling: “Thank you, Pheiri!” 

Elpida nodded. “Thank you, Pheiri,” she echoed softly.

Raindrops were beginning to patter against the exterior of Pheiri’s hull, a slow wave of muffled static to match the nuclear heartbeat from beneath Melyn’s feet. Elpida looked up at the ceiling as the rain got heavier.

She said: “Raindrops? His shields are offline?”

Haf said, “Pheiri knows best.”

Melyn grunted, “Pheiri’s tired.”

Elpida nodded slowly and looked around the crew compartment again. “You two live in here, don’t you? Me and my comrades, are we intruding?”

“Yes,” said Melyn.

“No,” said Haf.

Elpida almost laughed, but then she winced instead. “How long have you been living in here? Inside Pheiri?”

Melyn and Hafina shared a glance. Melyn looked at the nearest stack of her notebooks, on one of the benches. They’d been tossed around when Pheiri had to move fast earlier, so Haf must have piled them back up. Then Melyn looked at her blood-stained hands. She sighed; she had already ruined one notebook with bloody smears, when she’d tried to record what was happening with the zombies. She didn’t want to damage any more of them.

Elpida said: “You keep notes? You write down your history?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Mely is super smart,” Haf said. “Mely’s got the biggest brain even if she’s got the smallest body. She knows all the words and the right orders for them, too. She can read all the books. She knows what Pheiri is telling us as well. She writes everything down and it’s always there.”

“Haf!” Melyn snapped. She blushed. Haf kept smiling.

Elpida turned her head to look at the words on the spines of the notebooks. “Do you have a dating system? Is there a way to locate your earliest notebook?”

Melyn said: “Probably. I don’t know. I don’t have time to read them all.”

Elpida nodded. “What do you two do — I mean, what are you doing? Do you have a … a mission? Something Pheiri is trying to do, perhaps?”

Melyn and Hafina shared another look. Hafina shrugged. Melyn said: “Living? Living. What are you doing?”

Elpida smiled, but Melyn could tell it was a difficult smile. “That’s a very good question, Melyn. I don’t know.” Then she pointed at the open bulkhead hatch, opposite the infirmary. “Is that the bunk room? Is Amina in there?”

Melyn led Elpida across the crew compartment and into the bunk room; Haf started to get up, but Melyn frowned at her to stay put.

Elpida was almost too big for the bunk room; she filled the entire width of the narrow passageway between the bunks built into the walls. The rain outside was louder in here, a muffled drumming on Pheiri’s exterior. Three of the lowest bunks were crammed with equipment and weapons: Haf’s armour, easily reachable from the doorway; the zombies’ various weapons and guns and boots and bits of armour — including their really big massive scary gun that one of them had used to defend Pheiri. One bottom bunk was filled with Melyn’s notebooks and various other kinds of books, so dense that the scratchy blue blanket and thin mattress were entirely obscured; she couldn’t remember when she’d last added to or taken away from that pile. The screen of her mind said it was forty two thousand three hundred and seventy eight hours since she’d last been inside the bunk room.

The smallest of the zombies — Amina — was asleep in one of the top bunks. She was almost as small as Melyn, so she fit into the bunk with room to spare. She hadn’t closed the flimsy privacy curtains. She was curled up tight beneath her big heavy dark coat, hugging a blanket to her chest.

Elpida whispered over the rain: “Was she wounded?”

Melyn answered, “Bruises. Bruises. Nothing bad.”

“How long has she been asleep?”

Melyn read off the screen of her mind. “Five hours thirteen minutes forty four seconds. Forty five seconds. Forty six seconds.” She stopped herself with a click of her tongue.

“Thank you,” Elpida murmured. Then she reached out and gently brushed Amina’s dusky hair back over her scalp.

Amina’s eyes eased open. She stared at Elpida, groggy and sleepy

Elpida whispered, “Just wanted to check that you’re safe. Everyone’s okay. Go back to sleep, Amina.”

Amina made a sleepy sound and closed her eyes.

When Melyn had been performing surgery on Elpida’s stomach and Pira’s many wounds, some of the other zombies had tried to help, or gotten in the way, or shouted at each other, or made a mess. None of them had succeeded in doing much — except Atyle, who seemed to know which tools Melyn needed before Melyn knew herself, and kept handing her things before she reached for them. But Amina had done the least of all. She had stood in the doorway, crying and clutching her knife. Like Melyn would, in a fight.

But Elpida cared about Amina, the smallest and most useless of the zombies.

Melyn wasn’t sure, but she thought perhaps this made Elpida a little bit like Pheiri. She examined that word again: ‘Commander’. She did not restore the designation.

Elpida turned back to Melyn and indicated the rest of the bunk room. She murmured, “Is this your bedroom?”

“We don’t sleep in here. We sleep in the crew compartment. Haf can’t fit in the bunks so I would have to sleep alone. There’s no point.”

Elpida smiled. Melyn thought it was a sad smile. Elpida said: “I know that feeling. You and Haf always sleep together?”

“Yes. Yes. Always.”

“Don’t let us get in your way.”

“I won’t. I won’t.”

Elpida looked down at the bunk which was filled with old notebooks. They’d all tumbled around as well, thrown about by Pheiri’s fast movements earlier. A few had slipped onto the floor, but most of them were held in place by weight and friction and the lip of the bunk. That was to stop people rolling out if Pheiri had to move fast while they were sleeping.

Elpida said: “Do you mind if I take a look at your notebooks, Melyn, or are they private?”

Melyn shook her head. “Can you read? Haf can’t read them. I don’t mind.”

“I can read, yes. Would the oldest notebook be at the rear of this pile?”

Melyn shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Elpida smiled another difficult smile. “That’s alright then, thank you anyway. Let’s leave Amina to sleep.”

Melyn helped Elpida back into the crew compartment. Elpida seemed stronger now; she was putting less weight on Melyn’s arm. Melyn left Elpida to stand on her own two feet for a few moments while she went to the dispenser controls. The blood on her hands was truly dry now, so she rubbed some of it off on her jumper before she pressed the buttons. She had Pheiri disgorge three shiny, dark-brown food-sticks. Hafina crooned “Melyyyyyy, Melyyyyy,” until Melyn tossed her one of the sticks. Hafina caught the food-stick in one hand and ate it in three bites, then spent a long time licking crumbs out of her teeth.

Melyn offered the second stick to Elpida, but Elpida shook her head, and said, “Sorry, but I’m not sure I can eat anything except meat.”

“S’good fuh you,” Hafina said through a mouthful of nutrient block. “All the things a growing girl needs.”

Melyn said, “Haf. Don’t grow any bigger or you won’t fit inside Pheiri. Won’t fit inside Pheiri.”

Melyn stuck one food stick into her mouth and tossed the spare onto a bench. She spent a few moments doing nothing but chewing and listening to the rain.

Elpida glanced down Pheiri’s central corridor, and said: “Is that the way to the front? Is Atyle up there?”

Melyn nodded. She finished her food stick, wiped her hands on her jumper again, and led on, into the jumble of Pheiri’s innards. Elpida followed. Haf rose from her sitting position and squirmed along behind them.

Melyn and Hafina could have wriggled down this passageway with their eyes closed, over the abandoned seats and auxiliary systems, beneath the dark screens and dead readouts, past the hatches and ladders which led to other, smaller parts of Pheiri’s body. Melyn crossed the armoured bulge of Pheiri’s brain and absent-mindedly patted the metal. She shook a little bit when they passed the hatch which led down into the engines; her concealed wounds still itched, from when she’d descended into Pheiri’s secret parts to fix his heart. She was careful not to look upward when they passed beneath the turret ladder; she didn’t want to feel sick again.

Elpida moved slowly and carefully. She had promised she would not fall over and force Melyn to stitch her belly shut a second time. Melyn approved of that effort, and did not hurry her along.

But Elpida paused beneath the turret ladder. Melyn stopped to look back. Elpida was squinting upward into the dark. One of her hands wandered to the back of her neck, rubbing at the base of her skull.

Elpida asked: “Is that an MMI uplink helmet? It is. Crude, but—”

“I don’t know,” said Melyn. “I don’t want to think about what’s up there.”

“If that’s a direct communication uplink with this combat frame— I mean, with Pheiri, then I should—”

Melyn’s head started to hurt. “I don’t want to think about it. Stop asking. Please. Please.”

Elpida looked back down at her. She seemed surprised, but then she nodded. “Understood, Melyn. I won’t mention it again. Lead—”

Cruuunch-crack—

Pheiri’s tracks bit into concrete, crunching through brick, crushing stone; the sound floated upward through the hull, muffled by layers of armour. Pheiri slewed to one side suddenly; Melyn grabbed the back of a seat and Haf stuck out all her arms to grip the walls. Elpida was slower, lurching with the sudden motion — but somehow she reached out and closed a fist around one rung of the turret-ladder.

Thunk-thunk! — Thunk!

Heavy gunshots pounded from outside — one-two, a pause, then a third. The hull shuddered with recoil. Several seconds of silence crawled by, filled with the static of the rain. Then Pheiri’s innards growled and thumped — the sound of him reloading a weapon,

Hafina and Melyn both relaxed. Elpida didn’t look good. Her face was covered in sweat and she was wincing with pain.

Elpida said: “What was that?”

Melyn shrugged. “Pheiri shooting at something.”

“Keeping us safe,” Hafina said. “He just does that sometimes. It’s okay, he’s not shouting and flashing a lot, so it’s not a big deal. It’s only a big deal if he makes lots of noise and moves really fast a lot. Whatever it is has already gone away. He’s good at that!”

Elpida straightened up, let go of the ladder, and nodded. She wiped her face with one hand. “Does that happen often?”

Melyn shrugged. “Depends what he’s doing. Come on.”

Pheiri’s control cockpit was tall enough for Elpida to stand up straight. Melyn watched as Elpida’s eyes roved over the screens, the data readouts, the instrument panels, the many seats, the jumbled headsets, the sockets and levers and buttons and switches. Elpida stared for a long time at one of the seats at the very front — the one with the foot pedals and the big levers. Melyn had never figured out what that one was for. Elpida also stared very hard at the tiny observation window, high up on the right; that window had been unarmoured for as long as Melyn could remember, but sometime in the last twelve hours Pheiri had covered it up from the outside with his knobbly white armour plates.

Pheiri clicked and hummed and flickered and buzzed. All just like normal. All as he should be. Melyn felt — proud? That was a nice word. The screen of her mind didn’t complain.

She was proud of Pheiri. Proud that she was part of him.

She wasn’t so proud about the zombie sprawled in one of the chairs, with her hands behind her head and her big dark coat pooled on the floor. But at least it was the smart zombie, the one who had helped with the surgery.

Atyle looked up and around from Pheiri’s screens. She was dressed in an under-shirt and trousers; her strange green eye turned inside the socket. Her dark face split with a smile.

“The warrior rises from her fitful slumber, brought forth by the titan’s maid,” she said. Then she rose from her seat and gestured at it, while looking at Melyn. “Little maid, I have usurped your rightful place. Sit, please. This is yours.”

Melyn frowned. “You talk worse sense than Haf. Worse sense than Haf. Wish you would shut up, too. Shut up, too.”

But Melyn did not turn down the seat. There were many seats in Pheiri’s control cockpit, but somehow it seemed right that the zombie should offer Melyn the choice of whichever one she wanted. Atyle was a friendly zombie. Maybe she should be designated ‘Commander’.

Melyn sat down. Haf hung in the entrance, holding the metal walls with her six hands; Atyle glanced at her too. “And the titan’s great ranger. Care to sit as well?”

Hafina just grinned and shrugged.

Elpida grunted: “Atyle. You wounded?”

Atyle shook her head. “No, warrior. But you are.”

Elpida snorted. She gently lowered herself onto the threadbare stuffing and scuffed metal of one of the cockpit chairs. Several screens flickered to life above her; Melyn peered at those, but they were just Pheiri’s usual. She didn’t feel like standing up to examine in greater detail. Atyle leaned against the wall and stared at Elpida with her weird green eyeball.

Elpida said: “Atyle. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for rescuing me and Amina.”

Atyle dipped her head in silent acknowledgement.

Elpida said: “Kaga? Vicky?”

Atyle answered, “Still inside the great fallen god. They endure well enough, though they grow impatient.”

Elpida laughed softly. “Kagami especially?”

“The scribe was incandescent. She is glorious when she is angry. It sharpens her mind to an obsidian edge. She is beautiful from that angle, when she is thin and dangerous.”

Elpida squinted. “Right, okay. They’re safe. Good.”

Elpida’s eyes drifted shut, as if she was done now and it was time to go to sleep. Raindrop static filled the silence. Melyn was about to suggest that Elpida return to the infirmary.

But then Elpida said, “Any idea what that firing was, just now?”

Atyle replied, “We are pursued, though without passion. Hunting hounds, sent by your scorned suitor.”

Elpida’s lips twisted in disgust. “Yola. Don’t call her that, it’s not funny. Are we safe?”

“The titan assures me we are. The animals are wary. We are too deep for them.”

Melyn frowned at Atyle. “You can read Pheiri’s screens?”

Atyle smiled at her. “The titan speaks to me, little maid. Though without the great intimacy and affection he holds for you. You have nothing to be jealous of.”

Melyn kept frowning. Jealous? She wasn’t jealous.

Elpida croaked, “Too deep? Atyle, where are we? What are we doing?”

“Hiding beyond the graveworm’s aura,” Atyle said slowly. “The titan replenishes his strength, mends his armour and his spears. His maids have informed me of many things. The scribe informs me of many other things, but most of those are insults or critiques.” Atyle chuckled softly. “We rest and recover, warrior. There is nothing else to be done.”

Melyn found the conversation difficult to follow. Atyle and Elpida spoke differently to each other — they used different words in different orders. Elpida used verbs first, but Atyle’s verbs were all at the ends of her sentences. Elpida used a lot of funny suffixes and prefixes, all very neat and quick, which seemed to change depending on who she was talking about and where they were — or sometimes depending on how she felt about them; Atyle had none of those, but her verbs changed wildly, growing extra parts at the slightest provocation. The other zombies were just as irritating; the little angry one called Ilyusha didn’t use any ‘articles’ — the screen of Melyn’s mind provided that word, and she wasn’t sure what it meant, but she understood it in practice; Amina spoke with less vowels than everybody else; only Pira and Ooni sounded like they were speaking something similar to each other, though Melyn had not heard Pira do a lot of speaking. Despite this, the zombies all understood each other perfectly.

Melyn could understand them all, of course. But following the conversation took effort; she felt too slow to say anything much.

Elpida squinted her eyes and sagged in her seat. “Kaga and Vicky are still in the combat frame. We need to link back up. We can’t leave them behind. I’m not doing that, not—” She grunted and closed her eyes. “Yeah, okay, yeah,” she hissed, then opened her eyes again. “And the frame itself. I can’t— can’t just leave it— leave it there—”

Atyle said, “You need rest, warrior.”

Elpida snorted. “I thought you were all about following me wherever I went, because I’m so entertaining. What happened to that, huh?”

Atyle kept smiling. “You have a betrayer still to deal with, warrior. Not to mention our captured animal. And your little scorpion, she is so very sore.”

Elpida smiled too, but it was another difficult smile. “Yeah, yeah. Atyle — how did you do all that?”

Atyle’s strange green eye twisted and rotated in the socket. “All that, warrior?”

“The stealth field. The sudden competence. All of it.”

“The machinery of the gods holds an infinite bounty, for those who know how to receive it.”

“Nanomachine self-modification?” Elpida said. “Like Pira explained?”

Atyle nodded.

Elpida said, “Are you a Necromancer, Atyle?”

The screen of Melyn’s mind did not like that word; it suggested ‘nanomachine control locus’, ‘corrupted silicon life mind imprint’, and ‘blob’. She made those go away. She was too busy trying to listen to the zombies.

Atyle smiled wider. “Would I tell you, if I were?”

Elpida sighed and rubbed her face. “You saved us anyway. Fine. If you are, I don’t care. You’re one of us. I don’t actually think you are a Necromancer, but being mysterious all the time doesn’t help.”

Atyle seemed — pleased? Smug? Too clever for her own good? Melyn couldn’t decide which.

Elpida sat up straighter, and said, “I want to speak with Pheiri. I’m not going back to sleep before I do that.”

Melyn said, “You can talk to Pheiri from anywhere. Even in bed. In bed. It’s easy. I already told you. Already told you. He can hear you.”

Elpida gave Melyn a gentle smile; Melyn didn’t like that.

Atyle said, “The titan’s maid speaks truth, warrior. He hears our every word. We stand inside his body. His senses are turned inward as much as out.”

Elpida frowned at Atyle; Melyn could tell that the ‘Commander’ did not quite believe this. But she believed it more from Atyle than from Melyn.

“Okay,” Elpida said. “But I need to speak to him in a way he can respond to. I need to understand what’s going on here. I need to understand why he rescued us.”

Melyn said, “Because you’re a pilot.”

Elpida replied, “Maybe so, but that’s not enough. I need more.”

Atyle said, “What is to understand, warrior? Lost souls have found each other, in the deserts of the afterlife. Why must there be meaning? Can we not cling together, for no other reason but solace?”

Haf said: “Yeah. Yeah! That! That. I like that. Mely, I like that.”

Melyn grunted. “Mm.”

Elpida locked her tired eyes with Atyle, and said: “A giant armoured vehicle wearing a piece of my home just turned up and rescued me and my comrades. I want to know what he wants, or what he needs. I want to know if he wants us to be his … his crew? His friends? If his … ‘maids’—” she gestured at Melyn and Hafina with one hand “—if they need our help, somehow. If he needs our help. I want to know if we’re on the same side, and why. Or maybe his side is just himself, it doesn’t matter. I want to know what he needs — because if it’s within my power to grant, I will.”

Melyn revised her designation again: Elpida (zombie) (‘Commander’, provisional.)

One of the control cockpit screens next to Elpida suddenly cleared of Pheiri’s usual green-text data. New letters appeared on the screen, printing slowly, filling the black background. Elpida watched; the glowing green text coloured her face with ghostly light. Atyle leaned for a better look. Haf tilted her head. Melyn shot out of her chair and pattered over, then grabbed the back of Elpida’s seat and peered close, to make sure she was reading it right.

>
///ERROR division HQ non-contact
///re-designate command structure
///fallback protocol legacy version ERROR
///elevate permission control
///input Human-Human mastergene code access
///permission control overridden 99999999 ERROR hours previous: authorization Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren

///re-designate begin

.fallback protocol Telokopolan Officer recovered
.age unknown
.era unknown
.rank unknown
.designate Commander Elpida
.designate non-authority advisory role

///re-designate command structure complete
>

The green text stayed on the screen long enough for everyone to read it thrice. Nobody spoke, only the rain against Pheiri’s armour. Then the text vanished, replaced by a single line.

>Request orders

“No!” Melyn yelped. “Pheiri, no!”

Elpida said: “No. No, Pheiri, no. I-I can’t command you. I can’t. I keep getting everyone killed, or nearly killed. You— what— whatever you are, you’ve survived out here for longer than I can imagine, I— I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t command you.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Pheiri has kept himself going for so very long, with nothing but memories of his engineer for direction, nothing but a note to remind him that he’s a good boy. Protecting his charges, always moving, forever falling apart. But now, a ‘Commander’, a new voice. Will she give him renewed purpose? Will she offer hope?

Come on, it’s Elpida, that’s what she’s made for.

Melyn doesn’t agree, however. Melyn doesn’t like any of this shit! Melyn likes Haf; Melyn considers it very important that Haf is big and strong and Elpida is not quite as big and strong. Gosh, so, writing Melyn’s POV is a absolute blast, she’s so different to the zombies, I really enjoyed this. There’s a … lot happening in this chapter, below the surface. Elpida is about to have a lot of questions, about a lot of things. And perhaps we might explore some additional POVs, very soon.

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters ahead, or even more. I got a request for 5 chapters ahead, so I’m trying to see if I can somehow make that happen. Watch this space!

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And thank you! Dear reader, I could not write this story without you. Thank you for following along so far with my little tale of bio-tech zombie girls and big friendly thinking tanks, and their quest to find something worth believing in this weird rotten shell of a world. Thank you! I know I say this a lot, but we’ve barely even gotten started.

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

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Gunmetal grey — walls scratched and scuffed, ceiling ribbed and reinforced — mottled and marbled by remnants of faded cream-white paint, peeling and flaking, rubbed deep into the textured metal, reduced to recessed patterns in the nooks and crannies and hidden corners. Stale air; dried blood; clean steel. A distant throb purred from the deeps, the stately heartbeat of a powerful engine. Nearby: breathing, soft, shallow, difficult; fitful snoring, unquiet sleep. Further away: tiny machine-sounds, mechanical adjustments, auto-loaders sorting shells, the clack of metal on plastic, the murmur of voices behind layers of metal and rubber and wire and meat.

Elpida’s senses woke gradually, long before her conscious mind. She stared upward at that grey-white ceiling for several minutes, unmoving, unthinking, unable.

At least it was not the underside of a coffin lid. Score one for team Telokopolis. She was still alive — or at least as ‘alive’ as a nanomachine zombie could be.

No dreams this time.

Had she died and come back, like when she’d fought the Silico outside the tomb? She didn’t think so; there was too much continuity in her pain.

Elpida stayed very still, except to blink her sore eyelids and swallow her blood-tainted saliva. Her tongue felt like a dusty sponge stuck to the roof of her mouth. She was lying on her back, on a thin layer of foam, with a lumpy pillow wedged beneath her skull. Her hands rested by her sides, neither chained up nor tied down. A weighty blanket was draped over her legs.

She ached all over, with little distinction between muscles, joints, and connective tissue. Her endocrine and nervous systems had been stretched to breaking point, and were currently down and out for necessary recovery. Her head felt stuffy, full of rusty steel wool. Her belly throbbed with stagnant agony — the gut wound, burning away inside her flesh like a chunk of molten metal; but the pain had cooled from red-hot to merely the orange glow of heated steel. She’d healed just enough that the wound no longer consumed a significant chunk of her ability to think.

Her internal clock was still scrambled. She knew she’d been unconscious for a long time, but not how long — perhaps somewhere between six and ten hours.

A full night’s sleep. How luxurious.

Elpida’s eyelids were heavy as lead. Her body demanded more sleep, more rest, more recovery, more time to heal. She almost gave in; perhaps if she slept longer she might dream again, of Telokopolis, of her cadre, of Howl. Sleep would drive away the pain and the thirst for a few more hours.

But she couldn’t; she had responsibilities. She had to wake up and sit up and check on her girls.

No — her cadre. No, wait, that wasn’t right either. Her comrades. Friends? Friends, or companions. Her girls, her—

Forget definitions. Was everybody safe?

Elpida knew where she was: inside the crawler, inside ‘Pheiri’. Her memories of the escape and extraction were jumbled, but she knew she’d gotten everyone on board. Somebody had confirmed that, somebody had said, ‘Yes, Commander’. She’d rescued her cadre — no, Pheiri had rescued her cadre — no, no, Pheiri and Hafina had rescued her friends; no, again, Pheiri had rescued her—

Elpida cleared her thoughts.

Howl?

Howl did not answer. No familiar voice cackled and cavorted inside Elpida’s head.

Howl, please. If you’re there, please say something. I love you.

Pheiri’s engines throbbed a steady heartbeat. Dozens of tiny machine-sounds clicked and whirred from deep inside the metal. Nearby, somebody breathed, shallow and slow. Somebody else was snoring softly. Decking creaked. Bulkheads settled.

And Howl said nothing.

Elpida parted her bone-dry lips. “Howl?”

A blunt voice — not Howl — replied in a whisper: “Hywel?”

Elpida turned her head on the lumpy pillow. She looked around.

She was in a tiny, cramped infirmary, lying on one of two narrow slab beds; the room appeared too small for the amount of equipment crammed inside. The ceiling was very low. One wall was encrusted with cabinets and medical machines bolted to the metal surface; all the devices were dark, switched off, without power — except for a small number of recessed readout screens, filled with blocky green text and unreadable graphs. Many cabinets hung open, disgorging rolls of bandage, wads of gauze, and surgical tools in bloodstained disarray. A medical pod was set into the wall on the far left, but the machine looked broken: the steel-glass cover was shattered, the controls were unlit, and the person-shaped padded recess was crammed with clothing, medical supplies, a few blankets, and several stacks of books. A single bulkhead door stood open in the right-hand corner of the room; the walls beyond were more gunmetal and faded white.

Both beds and the floor were filthy with the brown-red stains of recently dried blood.

On Elpida’s right, lying on the other surgical bed, was Pira.

She’d been peeled out of her armour, most of her clothes stripped off or cut away. Dozens of wounds were wrapped in blood-soaked bandages, stopped up with gauze, and closed by fresh stitches. She’d sustained two separate head wounds: one on the right side of her skull, bandaged tight; another across her left cheek, jaw, and neck, closed up with an ugly mass of stitching, bleeding slowly into pads of gauze. Her bionic right arm was dented in several places, but appeared unbreached and intact. Peppered with bullet wounds and plasma burns, undoubtedly suffering internal damage, her flame-red hair dirty with her own blood, Pira was a mess.

But Pira was alive, breathing softly, and mercifully unconscious.

Ooni was sitting on a fold-out metal seat attached to the wall, wedged into the corner next to Pira’s bed. She was the source of the snoring; her head was rolled back against the peeling paint of the bulkhead, mouth hanging open, eyes closed and fitful, long black hair raked to one side.

Her grey armour carapace was gone and her weapons were nowhere in sight. Ooni was dressed in a tomb-grey under-shirt and a pair of baggy leggings, with a grey poncho or cloak over her shoulders. She looked lank and scrawny without the suit of armour.

Elpida did not have to guess who had disarmed Ooni; Ilyusha was sitting against the open door, red-black bionic claws stretched out across the floor. She cradled her shotgun in her lap, muzzle pointed at Ooni. Ilyusha was asleep too, head slumped against the metal. But her hands still gripped her weapon. Her left bionic arm was sticky black with dried fluid, but the rest of her didn’t look too bad; she’d washed off the worst of the blood and grime. Her blonde hair was all stuck out at odd angles, as if she’d dunked herself in a bucket of water.

On Elpida’s left — sitting on another fold-out metal seat, squeezed between medical machines and a tiny counter top — was a pixie.

Elpida stared. The girl stared back, unselfconscious and unsurprised.

Huge black eyeballs, double the size of human eyes, with no whites or sclerae. Tiny lenses adjusted beneath the surface as she examined Elpida in return. White-grey skin, as if to match the underlying metal of Pheiri’s insides, smooth and pore-less, more like polymer than flesh. She was barely more than four feet tall, built neither like a child nor like an adult with a genetic growth disorder, but slim and slender and compact, as if designed to fit into small spaces or to be folded out of the way when not needed.

Her facial features were neat and delicate, with thin lips and a rounded chin. Black hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail. She wore an oversized grey jumper with the sleeves rolled up, massive socks, and nothing else.

The pixie’s hands and forearms were coated with a sticky sheen of dried blood. She was holding them awkwardly in her lap.

Elpida stared carefully to make sure she was not seeing double: the pixie’s fingers were far too long and delicate to match the rest of her body — with seven fingers and two thumbs on each hand.

Elpida looked back up at those massive, black eyeballs. She croaked: “Hello.”

“Sut, ie, ie,” said the pixie. Then: “Hywel? Hywel? Hywel?”

Her voice was raw, blunt, and very tired. Elpida found it hard to read expression on her face, but now the crinkled sagging around her eyes made sense: shock and exhaustion.

Elpida croaked: “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” She swallowed more sticky saliva. Her mouth was too dry. “Water? Do you understand me? I need water, I can barely talk.”

The pixie’s eyeballs flickered horizontally. She frowned, hissed through her teeth, and blinked several times. Then she got off her seat, rummaged through the cabinets, and produced a battered tin mug. Then she stared at a pair of nozzles — taps, over a tiny stainless steel sink. She reached for one tap, stopped, let her hand fall to her side, started again, reached for the other, then stopped a second time. She frowned harder and harder as this went on. Elpida did not know what was happening, but she recognised the serious frustration.

“Take your time,” Elpida croaked. “Whatever you need.”

A notebook lay on the tiny counter top next to the sink — smeared with bloodstains, several pages ripped out and crumpled up by bloody hands. More frustration, perhaps?

Eventually the pixie selected a tap; the water trickled out, a low-pressure stream. She held the mug beneath the tap until it started to overflow. Then she hissed with frustration again and turned off the tap with an angry slap. Her hands left bloody smears on everything she touched.

Elpida spent several minutes failing to sit up; now that she and her comrades were safe she could no longer draw on the reserves of adrenaline and determination. Her body knew she was protected by a shell of Telokopolan carbon bone-mesh armour, and that others were dealing with the situation — Atyle and Kagami, she presumed. She needed to rest and recover. Sitting up was for combat, for giving orders, or for killing Covenanters.

The pixie did not try to assist. She just stood next to the bed, holding the mug of water.

Elpida discovered that she had been stripped to the waist. Her armoured coat lay over her legs; her ruined grey t-shirt had been spread out on top of the coat, to show the crescent-and-line symbol she had daubed in her own blood. The symbol had dried, turned brown, and begun to flake away from the fabric.

Her belly was wrapped in fresh bandages; a thick pad of gauze lay beneath, cushioning her gut. A thin line of blood showed through the clean dressing, but that was all.

Flesh pulled taut when she moved, stitches tugging at skin.

Eventually Elpida managed to maneuver herself into a sitting position, by first turning onto her side, then easing her legs over the lip of the infirmary bed, then finally levering herself up with her arms. Her vision throbbed grey and black for several moments; waves of pain radiated upward from her hidden gut wound; she felt like vomiting — then she tasted blood in her mouth. But she swallowed, screwed up her eyes, and gripped the edge of the bed. She found the floor with her feet. She took slow, deep breaths. She waited for her own natural pain-blockers to do their work.

The pixie waited until Elpida held out one hand for the mug.

The water tasted stale and recycled. Elpida drank it all, then asked for more. The pixie obliged. Elpida drained the mug a second time.

“Hywel?” the pixie said.

Elpida shook her head. “Translation isn’t working. Because you’re not a nanomachine revenant, are you? You’re another ‘ART’. Artificial human?”

The pixie did that horizontal flicker with her all-black eyes again, then blinked and frowned. Was she reading instructions?

Elpida pointed at herself. “Elpida,” she said. “That’s my—” 

“Dw i’n gwybod, ydw.” The pixie sighed. “Sut, Elpida.”

Elpida did not need nanomachine translation to understand the words or the attitude. The others had probably said her name plenty of times. She almost laughed. “Sorry, okay. So, what’s your name?”

“Melyn,” said Melyn.

“Melyn.” Elpida smiled. “Nice to meet you, Melyn. We can’t understand each other, not yet, but—”

Melyn rattled off words at high speed: “Dywedodd Pheiri wrthon ni am dal i siarad. Dal i siarad. Dal i siarad. Dywedodd e y byddwch chi’n ei datrys yn y pen draw, achos atgyfodedigion ydych chi i gyd, felly mae’n rhaid i ni dal i siarad. Dw i’n siŵr ei fod e’n iawn. Mae’n iawn. Mae Pheiri bob amser yn iawn. Pheiri?”

Melyn glanced up at the ceiling on that last word — the only one Elpida could understand. Melyn was addressing the tank, Pheiri, by name.

Why not? Elpida had already decided that the crawler was an honorary combat frame.

Elpida shook her head. “I don’t understand. I’m sorry. Where are the others? Amina, the little one, and Atyle, the taller one? And Hafina — is she one of your crew?”

“Maen nhw’n holliach. Holliach. Hywel?” Melyn repeated that word again. “Hywel? Beth oedd hynny’n ei olygu?”

Elpida frowned. If they couldn’t communicate, this was going to be impossible. Had Atyle already figured out the language? “I don’t understand your questions. I’m sorry. But I need to know that everyone is safe. Please nod or—”

Melyn nodded quickly.

Elpida contented herself with that. She allowed her eyes to drift shut. Maybe she should go back to sleep, but—

“Hywel?” Melyn said again. Elpida’s head spiked with a sudden flare of pain. She grunted. Then: “Howl?”

Elpida opened her eyes and blinked at Melyn’s massive black eyeballs.

“ … Howl?” Elpida croaked. “You said Howl?”

“That’s what I keep asking. Keep asking. What I keep asking,” said Melyn. Elpida could understand every word. “Keep asking you why you said Howl. First thing you said. Pilot said. You’re meant to be the pilot. Be the pilot. Pilot. Pilot.”

Melyn spat those last few repetitions, blinking and squinting. Melyn — artificial human, pixie, medic-bot — whatever she was, she was growing frustrated with her own words, as if she couldn’t stop repeating fragments. 

Elpida said, “I can understand you now. Maybe the translation software caught up.”

“What is Howl? What is Howl? Howl?”

“One of my dead sisters. I just thought I heard her voice, that’s all. It’s not important right now.”

Elpida could not possibly have lied any harder.

She wasn’t sure what she had experienced during the escape from the Death’s Heads. Elpida had not just imagined Howl’s voice — she had heard the tone, the rasp, the cackling giggle, the way Howl shaped her vowels and bit off the ends of words she didn’t like.

Elpida was no stranger to hearing the voices of her sisters inside her own head — that was what it felt like being plugged into a MMI-uplink comms network, while piloting their combat frames. All twenty five of her sisters networked together, their thoughts shared so much faster than speech, the most intimate connection possible with another human being. But hearing Howl in her head had not felt like being part of a temporary group-mind.

Howl had only started speaking after that dream — but that was more than a dream, wasn’t it?

A delusion, helped along by her undead nanomachine physiology? The graveworm, imitating Howl’s voice? A projection from the vast network of nanomachine ecology, a ghost in the ecosystem? Or had Elpida somehow re-created Howl inside her own brain, via nanomachine self-modification? Had she partitioned her own consciousness, or perhaps doubled her own undead neurological tissue?

Graveworm, was that you? she thought.

No answer. Elpida did not speak the question out loud; she didn’t want to frighten or upset Melyn any more than she already had.

Howl, please come back. If you can hear me. Or if you’re inside me. I don’t care what you are. Come back.

Nothing.

Elpida’s chest tightened with compacted grief. To be visited by a ghost of one lost so soon, and then abandoned again — it was too much. She doubted she would have made it out of that skyscraper if not for Howl shouting inside her head. Her eyes threatened to prickle with tears.

She took a deep breath and focused her mind; Howl had gotten her this far, for the sake of her new comrades. She needed to focus on them, not herself.

Out loud, Elpida said: “Melyn, did you stitch up my gut wound? And tend to Pira? That’s the woman on the other bed, Pira.”

Melyn looked down at her bloodstained hands and forearms, as if surprised to see them. “Yes. That was me. Was me. Was me. I didn’t know. Didn’t know.”

Wrong question? Melyn was more distressed than before.

“Thank you,” Elpida said, hard and clear, to regain Melyn’s attention. “We’re inside the tank, is that right?”

Melyn’s head snapped up. “Pheiri.”

“Pheiri, right. That’s a good name, I like it. Are you a member of the crew? How many of you are there?”

Melyn frowned, eyes flicking back and forth again. “You’re supposed to be a pilot. Supposed to be a pilot. That’s what Pheiri said. He said we were going to pick up a pilot. Pick up a pilot. P—unnnh.”

Melyn clenched her jaw and grunted hard.

Elpida said slowly: “I am a pilot, yes. I’m a combat frame pilot. Melyn, how many—”

“There’s just me and Haf and Pheiri. Just me and Haf and Pheiri.”

Elpida nodded. “And you rescued us? Thank you.”

“Pheiri saved you. Pheiri went out of his way to save you. Pheiri went a long way to save you. Pheiri keeps us safe and now he wants to keep you safe too. You safe too. I don’t understand why and I want you to tell me why, because you’re the pilot. Tell me why, because you’re the pilot. Pilot. Explain to me why we had to do this. Had to do this. Had to do this. I don’t— don’t- don’t— I don’t understand why we had to do this. Had to do this.”

Elpida took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Melyn. I don’t know either. I don’t know why Pheiri decided to come save me and my comrades. But I’m grateful that he did.”

Melyn frowned harder. She stared like Elpida was a terrible mystery.

Elpida tried a different track: “Pheiri saved us, then. Should I be thanking him?”

Melyn nodded, then looked up at the ceiling and said: “Thank you, Pheiri.”

“Is he self-piloted? Or were you the driver?”

Melyn stared at her for a long moment; her expressions were difficult to read, not quite human. Elpida decided that Melyn was half-puzzled, half-angry.

“Pheiri is Pheiri,” Melyn said after a moment. “He keeps us safe.”

Elpida nodded along with this; her mind was full of thoughts about combat frames given full autonomy, about dire warnings from the pilot program and the bone-speakers about what might happen if a frame was allowed to grow beyond specifications, about loyalty and true comradeship and this inexplicable machine wearing a piece of her home. She rubbed her thumb across the foam of the infirmary bed mattress — a little piece of the great machine which had invited her inside.

Pheiri felt different to the fallen combat frame lying out there in the crater, inside the ring of skyscrapers: that machine was either crippled or dead, unable to move under her own power, a mystery from orbit, fought over by incomprehensible Necromancers and ideologically vile revenants and mind-scratching worm-guard. Bait, or a trick, or an impossible lure — it meant something to this world which she did not understand.

But this little tank had turned up out of nowhere, surprised everyone, and welcomed Elpida home.

‘Little’. Elpida almost laughed. Pheiri was huge.

Elpida said: “Pheiri has no pilot, then? Am I understanding that correctly? Just you and Hafina?”

Melyn sighed and nodded.

Elpida asked, “Will he hear me, if I just speak out loud?”

Melyn stared and blinked, as if this was a very difficult question. “Of course he will. Of course he will. Of course. What are you even asking? What are you asking?”

Elpida looked at a random spot on the wall and said: “Thank you, Pheiri.”

Melyn relaxed; mission accomplished. Elpida doubted this fusion of combat frame and crawler could actually hear her speak, but playing along helped Melyn feel better. And it helped Elpida, too; she’d often spoken to the combat frames, even when she wasn’t plugged into the mind-machine interface. And this one — this bizarre fusion of different species of armoured fighting machine — had rescued her. She wished she could reach out and pet it somehow.

Elpida said, “The woman on the other bed here, Pira, she took a lot of bullet wounds.” Elpida glanced at Pira as she spoke. “Is she going to be—”

Pira was awake.

Her eyes were open, bloodshot, etched with pain, and narrowed with the effort of consciousness. She glanced around the infirmary, at Ooni, at Melyn, at Ilyusha asleep in the doorway.

“Fuck,” Pira croaked, so softly that it was barely audible.

Elpida said: “Go back to sleep, Pira. You need rest.”

“Speak … for … yourself.”

Go to sleep or get choked out, bitch — said Howl.

Grumpy, grumbly, heavy with sleep. The kind of voice that Howl made after chewing a pillow for six hours. The kind of voice that said she was going to need fucking awake three times before she would get up.

Elpida gasped. “Howl!?”

Pira frowned through the pain. Elpida waited, but Howl did not speak again. She’d rolled over and gone back to sleep.

Pira wheezed: “What?”

Elpida gathered herself. She felt a sudden return of energy — not much, but enough to put the whip-crack of command into her voice. “You’re mine, Pira. I made that clear. One of my cadre—” She almost stopped; she’d meant to say comrade, or maybe friend, but the word just slipped in. She was too exhausted to correct herself. “And I am ordering you to go the fuck back to sleep.”

Pira stared at Elpida for a moment longer, then closed her eyes.

“Good girl,” Elpida muttered.

In the doorway, Ilyusha shifted and grunted in her sleep. Elpida stayed quiet for a long moment. She didn’t want to wake any of the others. Everyone needed rest.

Melyn said: “I don’t know. Don’t know.”

“Mm?”

“You asked if Pira will heal. I don’t know. I don’t know. Haf says Pira saved Pheiri from an anti-tank weapon. I did the best I could— best I could— best I could— but I can’t— I can’t—” Melyn raised one bloodstained hand and thumped herself in the sternum. “Unnf.” She sniffed and carried on: “You’re all nanomachine conglomerations shaped like people. You don’t work like people, but you pretend to work like people. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I hadn’t been in the infirmary in—” She squinted, eyes flickering back and forth again. “A long time. Forgot it was here. Nobody to treat. Nobody to treat. Forgot.”

Elpida smiled. “Thank you for tending to us anyway. You did a good job.” She nodded at Ilyusha, at the black and sticky fluid clinging to her left arm. “Illy — Ilyusha — she got wounded too, but it’s bionics. Can you do anything about that?”

Melyn pointed at the floor — at Ilyusha’s backpack. The top flap was open. Five cannisters of softly glowing blue were nestled inside, cradled amid Illy’s supply of shotgun shells.

Five cannisters. They’d had six when they had departed for the combat frame.

“She drank one?” Elpida asked.

“She drank a single mouthful,” said Melyn. “Poured the rest down your throat and sprinkled it on your gut wound. On your gut wound. Got in my way. Got in my way. Got in my way. Made her give the dregs to Pira. Didn’t like that.”

Elpida could have laughed if she wasn’t so tired. “Illy means well.”

Melyn’s frown told Elpida that Melyn did not agree.

Elpida said, “Where’s everybody else? Amina, the little one, and Atyle, the tall one with the very dark skin?”

“Amina is sleeping in the … ” Melyn trailed off, frowning with effort. “Bunk room,” she said eventually. “She wanted to stay in here but there was no extra space. The floor is dirty now. Dirty now. Atyle is in the control cockpit talking to Pheiri and your other friends. Your other friends.”

Elpida took a deep breath and looked at the open bulkhead door. “I want to see Amina, and speak to Atyle, and the others.”

Melyn frowned extra hard. Her white-grey skin crinkled around her eyes.

Elpida said: “Do I have to stay in bed? Doctor’s orders?”

Melyn said very slowly: “I am not a doctor. I can’t tell you not to get up. Can’t tell you not to. Can’t tell you no. Can’t tell you no.”

Elpida said, “You can’t tell me no?”

Melyn’s eyes flickered left and right. She frowned and squinted and clenched her jaw. Elpida waited, but Melyn couldn’t answer.

“Melyn,” Elpida said slowly. “Is answering questions difficult for you?”

Melyn huffed through her nose. “No. What are you talking about? Talking about?”

“If answering a question is difficult, you don’t have to say anything. You can just tell me it’s hard. Okay?”

Melyn stared at her as if this was a very stupid suggestion.

Elpida tried something else. “Melyn — what are you?”

Melyn blinked. “A person? What a thing to ask.”

Elpida raised a hand in apology. “Earlier you called me a ‘nanomachine conglomeration’. Which means you’re not? You’re not a nanomachine-based revenant, like us?”

Melyn stared. “Of course not.”

This wasn’t getting either of them anywhere. Elpida said: “Why did you help us, Melyn?”

“Pheiri said he had to. Said he had to. Of course we’re going to help him! He’s Pheiri!”

Elpida nodded. “Okay, that makes sense. Does that mean I’m a … a good person? Does that mean we’re all on your side?”

Melyn clenched her jaw, trying to contain something — then she lost her temper. “I don’t know! Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot! An idiot! Stop!”

Elpida raised a hand again. “Sorry. I’m sorry, Melyn. I’m just trying to figure out … ”

Why had Pheiri helped Elpida and her comrades? Why had this pixie-like ‘artificial human’ tended to her gut wound and Pira’s bullet holes? Why was Amina sleeping in their bunk room? Why had this gigantic armoured machine — with, presumably, self-directed autonomy, like an unleashed combat frame — risked damage or destruction to extract her from a deadly firefight? Why had he cooperated with Atyle and Kagami?

Elpida hadn’t considered any of this during the escape. But now, watching Melyn struggle, Elpida began to consider the implications.

If Pheiri really was descended from Telokopolan technology, then perhaps he was following an imperative to rescue and protect her, personally. On the other hand, perhaps he just hated the Death’s Heads. Or perhaps this machine had an agenda of its own, or belonged to some other faction or side that Elpida could not yet comprehend.

But it didn’t feel that way. Where were the demands, the explanations, the threats?

Was this crawler-frame hers to command? Probably not.

Elpida needed to ask questions; so did Melyn, apparently. The little medic-bot didn’t seem to understand any more than Elpida did. She seemed lost.

So? Howl grumbled. Make her yours, dumb-arse.

Elpida said: “Melyn, does the name ‘Telokopolis’ mean anything to you?”

Melyn frowned in a different way — less obstructed, more curious. “No. No. But it might be in one of my notebooks. I’ll have to check. Have to check.” She glanced at the bloodstained notebook on the little counter top, then sighed.

Elpida bottled her disappointment; this line of questioning was not for her benefit. “Okay. Melyn, alright, let me try to explain what I can. I’m not just a pilot, I’m also a Commander. From Telokopolis — which might be the same place that Pheiri originally came from. Maybe. I’m not sure. Commander — that means I’m in charge—”

Melyn huffed. “I know what that word means. I’m not stupid. Not stupid. I have books.”

Elpida paused. “I apologise. So, I’m a Commander. And I think that might be why Pheiri went out of his way to rescue me. If Pheiri is from Telokopolis, and I’m from Telokopolis, and I’m the Commander, and Pheiri keeps you safe — that means it’s part of my job to keep you safe, too. That makes you part of my responsibility. My cadre. I’m your Commander too, Melyn.”

Melyn listened to this improvised garbage with an expressionless look. Elpida knew this was nonsense — she was making it up as she went. Melyn and Hafina were not hers to command; she had no idea why Pheiri had rescued her and her comrades. But Melyn was distressed, Melyn needed answers, Melyn was following some long-buried programming without knowing why. Strangers had filled her home and bled all over her floor; she deserved to be included.

“I’m the Commander,” Elpida repeated. “And I say you’re a doctor. You’re the closest thing we have to a doctor, or perhaps a surgeon. So, doctor — do I have to stay put and rest, or can I walk to the cockpit?”

Melyn stopped frowning quite so hard. She stared at Elpida’s belly for a long moment, at the bandages and the gauze and the thin crimson line.

“You lost a lot of blood. A lot of blood. But you don’t need your blood, not really. You can make it to the cockpit, but you might fall over and burst all the stitches and I’ll have to work again. And I don’t want to work again. It felt weird and I didn’t like it and my mind is all freshed and cleaned. I don’t like that either. Don’t like that either.”

Elpida said: “Melyn, I promise I won’t fall. If I need to sit down, I’ll sit down.” She held out a hand. “Will you help me to stand up, please?”

Melyn huffed — but she helped.

Elpida’s legs were surprisingly steady and strong; her head swirled with a drop in blood pressure and her gut complained by driving long spikes of pain up into her torso and lungs. She was correct about the low ceiling: she couldn’t stand straight. She had to hunch her upper back and lower her head to avoid banging her skull on the metal.

She left her armoured coat where it lay; she didn’t want to risk popping any stitches before she even left the infirmary. But she picked up the shredded t-shirt with the crescent-and-line symbol, and draped it over her shoulders.

Before she turned toward the bulkhead hatch she examined Pira and Ooni and Ilyusha once more. All three were sleeping soundly. But what might happen if Ooni or Ilyusha awoke without Elpida present? What if they both woke up and spoke to each other? What if nobody was around to halt any escalation?

Melyn must have read her expression. The pixie-sized ART said: “They all agreed not to kill each other. Not to kill each other.”

Elpida looked down at her. “They did?”

Melyn nodded. “When you shouted at them.”

“ … I shouted at them? When?”

“When I was gluing your gut wound, after the stitches. You woke up. You woke up. You woke up and said ‘Fucking bitches get along or get your heads knocked together. Do what the Commander fucking said.’ Then you passed out again. It worked and they stopped. They stopped.”

Elpida chuckled. Howl, speaking through her lips.

She had made it clear: they were her girls, she was their Commander. They had their orders. No fighting.

Elpida went to meet Pheiri.

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Poor little Melyn; I’m not certain that she thinks very highly of our ‘Commander’. And who can blame her? These zombies are very untidy, Elpida’s jumping to conclusions and asserting her authority, and she can’t even get out of bed without help. At least she said thank you, I guess??? The others are sleeping for now, but this could all get very complicated when they start waking up.

And Howl is still here. Surprise! But what, exactly, is a Howl?

Also! All credit for the meticulously correct snippets of Welsh in this chapter goes to one of my readers, Magpie, who helped proofread and correct my absolutely terrible Welsh grammar. A big thank you! I wouldn’t have been able to do that without help. Any remaining grammatical errors are all my fault!

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon! Link! Woo!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! Right now I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead so I can offer patrons 2 chapters in the future, or even more. I got a request for 5 chapters ahead, so I’m trying to see if I can somehow make that happen. Watch this space!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And, as always, thank you, dear reader. Thank you for reading my little story so far. Thank you for following these weird meaty zombie-girls on their adventures at the end of all things. The end?? Ah, but no, there is so much more to come. Seeya next chapter!